


A Year of Visitors

by Farmulousa



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Eventual Smut, F/M, Implied/Referenced Character Death, M/M, Seer Luna Lovegood, Sexual Tension, Suicidal Thoughts, lonely hermione
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-02-04
Updated: 2020-09-01
Packaged: 2021-02-27 21:34:47
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 16
Words: 48,899
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22552597
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Farmulousa/pseuds/Farmulousa
Summary: Harry Potter has been in a coma for four years. The Order are in hiding, fighting except for Hermione who has turned a set of flats in Southern France into a Library. Her job is to find a way to get Harry back and that’s exactly what she is trying to do. It’s all she has to do, except that is, but waiting for visitors.
Relationships: Draco Malfoy/Harry Potter/Ginny Weasley, Hermione Granger/Remus Lupin, Neville Longbottom/Luna Lovegood, Pansy Parkinson/Charlie Weasley
Comments: 142
Kudos: 126





	1. Chapter 1

**Chapter 1**

**Lyon, December 2001**

Hermione could only reasonably hold four textbooks at a time. She had dabbled with five and tried with six, but four she could manage. She looked up at the shelves in front of her and looked for the space she needed. These four books were on cursed poisons, a dead-end in her research once again, and once they were back in their place she walked towards the exit from Apartment 3. The Lyon Apartments were unique as a safe house in that they must be, she had thought from time to time, technically safe  _ houses _ . 

Three years ago, she had been escorted from Scotland by Kingsley, a portkey to Paris and two hours on a Voyage Magique train to Lyon. They had walked, dragging Muggle suitcases full of books across the tram stops and down a wide main road that opened to a junction it shared with the river that flowed through the city. It was November and it was unseasonably warm, she was sweating through the white cotton dress that Luna had given her when she had left Scotland. If Kingsley had noticed that her bra was clearly visible through the back of her dress, he hadn’t said anything as he walked behind her following a Muggle map to their destination. 

When they arrived, she had looked up at the staircase in the lobby with awe. The building consisted of eight very plainly furnished apartments and a small service apartment in the eaves of the roof. There was a lift tucked to the left, aside the odd-numbered apartments and when she stood to the left of the foot of the stairs, she could see the railing at the top. 

She found herself there two weeks later, her bare feet on the lacquered wooden floor and her hands on the polished banister rail. To the right was the entrance to the flat, that when she had first moved in, she had been able to store all of the books in. She had dragged a large, solid wood dining table into the living room, pushing the sofas and chairs out of the way and pulled a single dining chair to sit at her new massive desk at which she would work. She had always loved the long, old and worn tables in the Hogwarts Library, the surface area was never smooth and so they were never too cold to lean her forearms against even in the coldest months. This table had been carefully looked after by its owners but they weren’t here now and she was and she planned to put her new desk through its paces. 

She had been reading from a text that she already knew didn’t contain the answers, one of the ones she had brought from Scotland. It was the only text she had found so far that even mentioned the concept of a wizard or witch in a coma. She read the passage in the seventeenth chapter a few times before she realised she would have to go downstairs and get one of the boxes of books that Bill Weasley had dropped off when he was here to install her guard dog curse that would protect her from unwanted intruders. 

Unwanted intruders meant Death Eaters, it meant that she had failed and that everyone she cared about would be dead within days of her being found. She had been installed in the Lyon Apartments alone, she was the fidelius charm’s only secret-keeper. Her knowledge couldn’t travel the continent like the other members of the Order; her brain being captured couldn’t be risked. It had become more and more obvious to those of them hiding in Elgin, Scotland that she also was unable to stay nearby either. Every day Harry got worse and worse, no matter how hard they tried or how many potions that they fed the sleeping boy - Harry was fading fast. Hermione was distracted from her task of finding out how to wake him and the accidental magic she was giving out was causing too many traceable signs of where they were hidden. 

No, Hermione could not be found. Not alive. 

As this thought rolled around her brain and the concept that her being found would need to mean her being dead, and quickly, she walked out on the landing. The banister at the top of the foyer was wide, probably once very grand. The Muggles who lived here were not outrageously wealthy but had obviously had a fair amount of money to afford these large sprawling apartments and the servants that must have slept in the apartment in the roof. The banister wasn’t only made for function but also for show, which meant that if she were to balance her weight correctly - she might be able to stand on it. 

She didn’t try that day, choosing to walk down the stairs and retrieve the new books, three on Muggle biology and one on magical cores. She had purposely avoided looking at the railing on her way back to the apartment with her makeshift office and started reading her new texts. Allowing herself to forget about the riddle of what to do if she were found and carried on with the regimens of her days in the apartments. When she had just gotten there she would receive maybe a dozen books a week, all with different connections to Harry’s condition and some no connection at all that she could decipher. 

Another day, she was putting the last of the books that had arrived that day on the shelves of an apartment on the second floor, a pigeon slammed hard into the railings outside the sash windows of the room and Hermione screamed, her heart pounding against her ribcage. She had been by herself for six weeks by this point, mostly in complete silence except when people would walk to or from work below her, their voices humming quietly. If anything they gave her the comfort of time passing normally; that somewhere some people were living their lives, looking up at the clock on their wall and not smashing it against the floor just to watch the glass front shatter across the parquet flooring. But mostly, the calm quiet had permeated the apartments until now when the bangs below hadn’t even finished echoing across the foyer, Hermione had crossed the landing and hauled her body up using her forearms so that she was crouching on the wide banister ledge like she was getting out of a swimming pool. 

She stood up only when she felt like her position would mean she could fall forward. When her feet were shoulder length apart and she had found her bearings, it wasn’t scary at all. She could feel the air around her, her arms hung comfortably at her side; it was almost peaceful. Maybe it was because she had once rode a dragon from London to the Peak District, but it was actually quite nice. 

Quite nice and useful because she would definitely die.

Her brain would die with her and so would the secrets of the Order. 

This had become a comfortable routine. She would never know when it would happen but an unexpected noise or a shadow that resembled the height of a person would catch the corner of her eye and she would run to the banister ready to protect her friends and destroy the knowledge that lived in her. 

Now, three years later, the desperation was different. Hermione’s panicked but familiar movements could be delayed. She could go about the whole afternoon some days before giving in and climbing onto her worn footprints of the wooden ledge of the railing. She had heard an awful screech of brakes from a car below a few hours ago. It wasn’t the scream of Bellatrix Lestrange or the high-pitched crack of a curse through the air and it was okay and no one had found her and she would be okay. She’d reassured herself everything was okay but not enough not to climb up onto the banister. Not enough not to say her goodbyes. 

_ Harry _ . Hermione looks into his eyes in her head. She hasn’t seen his eyes in more than three years but the visage of him she conjured in her mind makes her feel less alone.. She remembered Hagrid falling to his knees in the rubble of Hogwarts as he discovered that Harry was alive. That Harry’s tiny breaths had been terrifying to the Death Eaters, Voldemort so rocked that he’d been unable to kill the boy again that mayhem broke loose. He had been moved to the safe house in Scotland and lied there day after day, a small body in a transfigured bed. He’d seemed to be losing weight by the hour. Despite her fear of leaving him alone, Hermione knows Harry would understand why she did this, that her death kept the people they loved safe. 

_ Ginny _ . Ginny would be furious that she was doing this. Ginny, so used to loving and being loved by others, all or nothing. The youngest Weasley and easily the toughest would claw Hermione off that banister and scream at her for even considering it. Scream at her about obligation, about how they needed her. That they were family and you didn’t abandon family. What Ginny wouldn’t say is how much she needed Hermione, that if Hermione was dead then what was the point in any of them living? But Hermione  _ had _ abandoned them, she’d had no choice. Under orders from the one person who seemed to know what they were doing - Luna. 

_ Luna.  _ Luna was the reason she was here. Without Luna, Hermione would be reading the same seventeen books over and over again as Harry withered away. Luna’s father had a contact in Lyon who, upon hearing of Xenophilius’ death, offered anything he could to help them. Luna convinced the man, a magical bookseller, to start sending the start of Hermione’s library. Luna had somehow organised these apartments for her, and she knew what was going to happen, and often  _ when _ it was going to happen. She would look you in the eye and see past your physical person, ask you if something had happened yet and when the answer was no - that thing would happen very shortly. Luna was the one that knew Draco Malfoy would be the only person who could keep Harry alive and convinced the Order that not one of them left was anywhere near as good at potions. Luna, who had helped Hermione brew the Wolfsbane for Remus the last time she had visited, only just getting it the correct colour. Luna was the one that corrected anyone who referred to Ron in the past tense. 

_ Ron.  _ Ron was presumed dead. No one had seen him after Harry had been found to be breathing, and his family had looked for hours. Hogwarts abandoned, people returned periodically in the vain hope that he was somehow wandering the halls of the school. As she teetered on the edge of the railing, Hermione felt shame rise in her that she had been so focused on Harry, so cautious of Malfoy, and so worried for Ginny that she hadn’t noticed that Ron wasn’t with them for more than a day. 

Luna had never said that she knew where Ron was, but she had said several times that she was sure he would be alright. But that had been more than three years ago; everyone who visited her here  _ knew  _ that Ron was dead. That he had either been taken by Death Eaters or killed in the panic that followed the battle. Hermione, too, thought that he was dead. He had to be. She had no choice but to think that because if he was anything else,  _ anywhere _ else, what had become of him? Ron was the person that she had said goodbye to the most when she thought of her friends. He had been her closest confidant, and at one point, she thought he may have been even more. When they’d been in the tent and he had held her hand as she cried and cried for her parents they could have had more. He had kissed her, a desperate touch she returned, but that was so long ago now. He had to be dead because if he was dead he was safe. 

_ Remus _ . He came to the front of her mind very slowly and then all at once. Whenever she said her goodbyes, her old professor sat at the back of her mind with a kind and patient smile. He would wait for her to finish with a calm and relaxed posture and then he would stroll forward until he looked in her eyes. The way he did when she was talking about something she was interested in, like she could talk for hours and he wouldn’t get bored. When he had first visited her here, that was exactly what she had done. It had been two years since he had visited last and she had only had a few people come to see her and they had been people that she didn’t have much of a history or connection with, but Remus was different. 

Remus Lupin had been her teacher. Her favorite teacher. He had told her time and time again that she was his friend. She’d blushed as a teenager and had been awkward as an adult as she tried to think of a world where this kind, warm, and  _ handsome _ man could be her friend. If he was her friend, if she was no longer his student, then she could have what she wanted from him and that was terrifying. It was so much worse than the drop that waited below her. 

When she had still been in Scotland and her world was falling down around her, Remus had sat by her side and listened to her theories. He had gently poked holes in the ones that held no merit and expanded ones that showed promise. He held no expectations for her to be immediately able to save Harry. He didn’t look across the room with hopeful eyes like Neville or the Weasleys that visited Elgin with supplies. Luna had been certain that, with Draco keeping Harry alive that, Hermione was the one who could wake him up. But Remus was the one that made her  _ feel _ like she could be. Maybe. One day. 

The last time he was here, she had gone through each of her theories one by one as if he could pick the right one out of the line-up. He had been so patient with her, and his eyes had warmed from green to gold as she had shown off her most recent discoveries that she thought could help. 

But that had been two years ago, that had been after two visits from Charlie Weasley where they had gotten so drunk that she had fallen asleep on the floor of her kitchen. She had been visited by Kingsley and when she had shown him her work she had felt like a schoolgirl asking for praise. He had been kind and had some very good points surrounding the poisoning theory she had floated with him, but he was too imposing, and she didn’t know him well enough to trust that he would consider her theories valid. She had been visited by Fluer once, during which they had bonded far more effectively than they had in the Weasley’s back garden. Fleur had a brilliant methodical brain, and they had talked about Muggle psychology and any physical issues that could be affecting Harry, but they had come to no new answers. 

Remus was the only one who made her failed avenues feel like progress; he was the only one who had talked her through her breakdown surrounding brain swelling that she had come across in a Muggle medical journal. He had put his warm hands on her temples, pressing in soothing circles that had helped her relax. He was who she felt closest to even when they had only seen each other once in more than two years and he was who she waited for now. 

_ Flumpnk. _


	2. Chapter 2

**Lyon, December 2001**

_ Flumpnk _

  
  


It was the sound she longed for. The sound that when she thought she heard it, would wake her from sleeping in excited hope. Like hearing a clicking, something quiet and repetitive and even after it stopped, the ghost of the sound follows for moments after. It has been three days since she received an owl informing her that someone would be visiting and no less than seven times she had thought that maybe, perhaps and possibly, she had heard that sound. It was the mix of a person appearing into space, accentuated by how much the sound echoed through the lift that went up the core of the building. It always ends with a particularly metallic edge—the sound of an adult-size body hitting the sides of the lift. 

But this time, this time she had definitely heard it. Somehow, she knew. She also knew because as her feet slammed into the stairs that separated her annex flat from the main body of the complex, she could hear a voice. 

A male voice, swearing. 

She grinned as she repeatedly poked at the call button for the lift. She knew this voice, this voice that erased the fears that lead her to the banister. The sage green painted metal of the lift doors had worn around the button from use. It had been that way when she moved in, but it had gotten worse. She was certain that no previous resident had treated this button with quite so much violence as she had over the past three and a half years. Every time she pressed it, whenever a new visitor arrived, she was too eager to see them and the button suffered. Her joy turned manic, feeding from the fear that crackled over her skin only moments before. 

“Remus.”

The small ding sounded, the doors opening too slowly, but it afforded her enough time to smooth down the wool trousers she wore. There was little she could do about the rest: a rumpled cream cotton button-down and two thick knit cardigans. A larger one over a smaller. But too slowly and all at once, he was there. Still grumbling, probably still swearing under his breath, he had braced himself against the edge of the small lift. He was tinged green. He gave her a wavering smile. 

“Hermione,” he breathed, “Happy New Year.” 

He took her in a warm, slightly shaky hug. His breath was close against her hair at her neck, reminding her how cold the air of the large foyer was around them. The space was too large to charm; the magic would be too big, too noticeable. They would find her, and they couldn’t find her; she wasn’t done yet. She pulled away from his embrace, getting a good look at his face. The lines and thinner scars around his eyes were convincingly  _ Remus _ ; she could see a flicker of old in his left iris. Undeniably him, she could rationalise that if he was here and it was really him, then it was safe. She was safe. 

“Happy New Year?” she asked, momentarily blinded by her joy for another person to talk to. 

“Yes, it’s December 31st.” He frowned at her, but he was still smiling good-naturedly. 

“Oh, I don’t pay attention to the days anymore. I think I knew it was near Christmas,” she said, stepping fully away now, turning to lead him up the stairs. The stairs that lead to the annex flat in the loft of the building are very steep. Hermione believed that it would be where service staff would have lived when the building was a series of expensive apartments for the upper-middle-class Muggles. Not that it matters now; only she lived here now. She remembered how unnatural it once felt getting up these stairs - like she was climbing on her hands and knees. The muscles in her legs had started to hurt when she had been there for several weeks, but now, as she glanced over her shoulder to see Remus hunched with his hands on the steps in front of him, she felt completely strong and balanced on the shallow spiral steps that led from the top floor of apartments to where she lived. 

She opened the front door to her living space but didn’t get far as Remus followed behind her. He prattled on behind her but she wasn’t listening because they both couldn’t fit in the very small hallway, and her forehead gently tapped a coat hook on the wall that faced the front door as his body weight pushed into her. 

He was warm, always warm. She knows, academically, that he runs warmer than her but the academics of it are not what distracts her. He paused, pressed up against her, no pressure, just two people standing too close together. It’s enough for her though, her teenage crush and pleasant adult fantasies and debilitating loneliness. The loneliness that is being set on fire by a man, this man, so close to her. 

“Hm.” He coughs slightly. “It’s much warmer up here,” he said as if it were just something to say and pushed past her into the small living area of the long, rectangular room. The pillars were sloped with the roof so that neither of them could stand entirely straight unless they were walking down the centre towards the door of her bedroom. 

Hermione always saw her flat anew when her visitors came to stay. It’s in shambles really, put together over the years that she had resided here. A deep and plump old sofa was up against the side of the room, the sloping roof adding to a sense of coziness. A wood-burning fire sat in the middle, almost separating the kitchenette and dining table from where they stood, but it was too small for it to feel anything like two rooms. 

“I keep the fire going almost all the time now.” She doesn’t know why she said that. She often finds that when people come to see her that she just says things and then has to decide after whether what she had said was really needed. He nodded as if it were an interesting observation, looking at the books that were stacked by the sofa on their side with several rolls of new parchment on top of them. He laughed when he realized what she already knew; they are all different editions of  _ Hogwarts: A History _ . Different members of the Order had ent them to her each year, sometimes as many as three in one year. 

“There’s been no news, you know.” she blurted in a small voice. She hoped that he heard it though because she didn’t know if she could say it again. It had been three years; she’d had fourteen visits, and this was Remus’ second. She felt like she was falling where she stood with her eyes stuck on her copies of  _ Hogwarts: A History _ . She had been sent there to research; the Order had made contact with a magical book collector in Southern France, and Hermione had been sent to read. All she did was read, all day every day. 

As she watched him turn with a sorry smile on his lips, she thought she might be sick. Harry needed her help, and she had been of no help. No help in three years. Harry wasn’t waking up; he’d been asleep for such a long time now. The Battle that had felt like the end had been a strange opening chapter to what would be a years-long effort. 

Hermione didn’t even know what winning would look like anymore. Wizarding Britain hadn’t had a Ministry for more than two years; it turned out that terrorist blood-supremacists couldn’t run an entire government by themselves. No one went to Hogwarts, The Order was bigger than even but never saw each other. They relied too heavily on Luna, Hermione thought, but her old friend had been correct in everything so far. 

She was brought out of her revery by Remus taking her hand in his and rubbing her knuckles with his rough calloused thumb. Cracks in the skin around where his fingers join his palm spiderwebbed outward, and she squeezed his hand too hard. 

“I’m not here for information then; I’m here for you.” 

“And… and Wolfsbane,” she says, lifting her eyes to his where a flare of warmth lights up behind his pupils. 

“That will be an excellent cherry on the even better cake of seeing you.” He blushes and turns away very quickly from her, moving around her kitchen. He’d only been here once before, but he seemed to find what he needed easily enough. He made them both tea while she moved over to the sofa, and she picked up the parchments that she had been writing before she had made her way to the banister. The parchment wasn’t in a particularly good order, but she knew that he wouldn’t be here for long. Not if she doesn’t have news. So she put them on the floor next to the sofa and decided to come back to them tomorrow. The books she had been working from were still open on the coffee table, so she placed bookmarks in each and closed them, piling them next to the table, which was now clear except for her teacup from this morning. 

\---------------

Remus felt like his skin didn’t fit properly. He knew that Hermione’s flat was small and warm, but he felt like he had been put in a furnace. The flush of her skin had him itching to touch the swell of her cheeks and drag the edge of his thumb along her jawline. 

_ She smells good too.  _

Moony had made a habit of coming to the very front of his brain when Hermione was the subject of his thoughts. He didn’t know when it had begun, but he had noticed it when he had been here with her in the room they were standing in a little over a year and a half ago. She had mentioned that she would be turning twenty-two that September, and he had told her that she didn’t look a day over twenty-one as a joke, and he had noticed her. She had grown into herself since her years as a teenager. He had remembered her being all arms and legs one minute and then truly uncomfortable with the woman’s body she had been given. 

When he had come to see her in June 2000, he had come from visiting Dora’s grave. It isn’t really a grave as much as a stone in Andromeda’s garden, one where he would visit more often when his mother-in-law and son lived there, but he didn’t know where they were now. No one but whoever lived there now and Luna knew where his son was because that knowledge wasn’t safe in his head, the same way that his knowledge about some members of the Order wasn’t safe in others. 

The first time he had visited Hermione, he had gotten a Portkey, a small pink hair clip, from the garden to Hermione’s lift. He had been talking to his dead wife, something he only did when visiting the stone. For the first time since she had died two years before that, he couldn’t imagine her talking back. She had left no ghost behind, but Remus had always thought that he could hear her talking back to him. Calling him stupid, calling him sexy, but he had found himself being unable to conjure her personality in his mind. The guilt had overcome him. He had been almost silent for the first few hours of visiting Hermione, who had clearly thought that he was angry with her for not having news of any cure for Harry, and he had done nothing to stop her from thinking that by wallowing. 

In the months following that visit though, the guilt that faded away made space for her. Hermione. She took up the most glorious and irritating amount of space. She would sit next to Moony in his head, and Moony would worship her with words and fantasies. If Remus had found himself infatuated with her, then Moony was obsessed. Moony would grovel at her feet. 

_ I would do more than grovel if I found myself at that witch’s feet, dickhead, and you’ve been quiet for too long. She’s worrying.  _

Remus peered up, catching Hermione looking at him. Her facial expression was clearly that of someone who had repeated herself a few times before waiting for any answer. “I’m so sorry, Hermione; I was a thousand miles away. What did you say?”

The edges of her mouth turned up slightly with the breezy tone he was able to scrape from somewhere. “I asked,” she said, probably more slowly than she usually spoke, “if there was any news from your end?” 

Remus sat down on the sofa with two cups of over-brewed tea that he had left on the countertop for too long while lost in his thoughts. She sat opposite him on the sofa and pulled her knees to her chest. Remus said a few Muggle prayers that she would extend her legs out towards him, but he knew where that line of thought had gotten him last time. “Charlie is back in Caerphilly with George now. They make a good team.” 

“The Weasleys often do,” Hermione said, looking down at her knees where she balanced a cup of tea he had passed her. Remus knew that this information wasn’t what she had been after. Hermione was a good friend and was close with all of the Weasleys, but there was only one Weasley she would want to talk about, and that was a conversation he absolutely couldn’t have with her. Ron wasn’t even at the top of her list. Harry was at the very top of Hermione’s list. 

“Harry is fine,” Remus said on an exhale. Hermione’s body sagged in obvious relief. “Ginny is ok, although I think she may be going a little stir crazy, and Draco is doing his best.” 

“You call him Draco now?”

“If he keeps Harry alive, I’ll call him anything he wants.” 

\-----

Hermione took another deep breath and felt magic tingle in her fingertips, although it could have been a sign that she was hyperventilating. Malfoy had made it very clear to all of them that he was serious about keeping Harry healthy. Hermione had vouched for him after watching him brew faster and more precisely than she had seen anyone do since she had walked in on Professor Snape actually brewing and not teaching in her fifth year. Draco was a genius; he knew what to give Harry and when to give it, and Hermione knew that was something that she would never be able to do. So she fought with Neville and with every overprotective male ego so that Draco Malfoy could be kept close to make sure Harry lived. 

Remus continued to update her on various members of the Order, lots of them he very carefully left out exactly where they were. They both knew that the Death Eaters knew that the Caerphilly safe house existed. For a while, they had been spreading the misinformation that that was where Harry was, but a Lestrange cousin and Rookwood had turned up and Charlie almost lost a leg killing them. So if she was told someone was in Caerphilly, then that usually meant that that was where they were. Other than that location, she was never allowed to know where her friends were. 

As he talked, she watched his lips move, zoning out when he had started to talk through the stages of an operation so vaguely that it wasn’t interesting anymore. His hands moved with deft and specific movements from his long fingers. They were fingers that she could imagine running through her hair. She had first thought about what his fingers were capable of in the late hours of the weeks following his last visit. He had been so quiet and introspective that all she could do was observe him, and she had found herself drawn to him. 

She had stared and watched and gawked, and he hadn’t seemed to notice so she continued her exploration with her eyes. It wasn’t until he had left - until the lonely nights had set in again and she knew she wouldn’t have another visitor for weeks or maybe months that she had allowed the information about his appearance to flood her mind as she let her fingers crawl beneath her underwear. 

Now as he spoke, it was like she had her own private show. He spoke about their friends, of news in Britain and inconsequential things that she filed away to think about when she wasn’t out of her mind with wanting him. His kindness and easy charm were one thing, but when he spoke about protecting himself or others, she watched the wolf inside him come to the surface. She had noticed that his eyes had a ring of gold around them since he had arrived, but as he spoke and they made eye contact, the gold expanded, enveloping the green until he was pinning her to the sofa with liquid gold eyes. 

\-----

Remus stopped talking. He knew very well that she hadn’t been listening, her mind elsewhere, but his ego had been soothed by her eye contact and her attention. 

_ She’s watching you,  _ Moony crooned. __

Remus scoffed back at his counterpart.  _ She’s bored by me _ . 

_ She can see me though. She’s watching.  _

Remus sat back on the sofa and let the silence ring on. Hermione seemed determined to protect that silence but he also saw her teeth nibble at the inside of her lip. He never once saw her teeth, but her bottom lip moved rhythmically as she worried the inside of her mouth. He knew his eyes were gold; he was plummeting faster and more roughly down the hole he had made for himself, from wanting her. Moony was pounding at the inside of his head. 

But it was Hermione who moved first. She slowly moved her legs beneath her until she was on her knees. 

_ She’s on her knees, you twat. Do something.  _

Remus leant the inches forward so that he could reach his hand out to touch her face. It was cooler than he was, but the blush beneath her skin was certainly warming her through. Her breath was stale across his cheeks, but it might as well have smelled of honeysuckle to him; everything about her seemed fragrant and sweet. She was ambrosia, amortentia. She was leaning into his hand. He leaned forward, knowing what awaited him there was awful and marvelous, that kissing her and then immediately leaving was a crime of romance that he would have to do his time for. 

\-----

Hermione felt the breath leaving him through his nose, and his rough calloused fingers took a firmer grip on her jaw. She couldn’t move. His large hands not only meant that his hand was on her jaw but also around the back of her head. His hands in her hair, and it was everything she had imagined. She was screaming at him to do something, to close the gap or reject her, and when he moved she thought perhaps she was in control of him and they were closer again now. She thought she felt his lips against hers, but that was when a huge glowing blue bear walked through the walls of the flat.

Neville Longbottom’s patronus, only just shorter than the tallest part of the ceiling, stood before them, and even though the bear didn’t have eyes and this message would have been sent probably a little over an hour beforehand, Remus launched himself away from Hermione at a speed that felt like someone had slapped her across the face. 

\-----

“Remus, you’re needed. The hair clip is a Portkey again,” the bear said clearly but quickly before turning around and walking back out of the flat as if they weren’t four floors up. 

“Umm, yes. So…” Remus stood up and narrowly missed hitting his head against the ceiling, at its lowest above the sofa. “Stay safe, Hermione,” he said before he walked out the flat with his feet hammering down the steep steps. 

_ You’re a cunt, and I hate you.  _ Moony growled retreating backwards until Remus could barely feel him. 

_ Me too. _ Remus said as he grabbed the glowing hair clip he had dropped outside the lift.  _ Me too.  _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for the lovely comments from the first chapter, I hope you liked this one just as much.


	3. Chapter 3

**Lyon, April 2002**

A car had backfired from the alley that ran behind the apartments. 

A few Muggles that ran a bakery, a pharmacy and a counterfeit luxury handbag shop respectively, all lived in the little flats above the shops and the entrances were in that alley. Hermione knew that the man who ran the bakery got there at four a.m., and he arrived on a bicycle; the woman who managed the pharmacy would usually get there at least two hours later, and she was dropped off by another woman in a car. It wasn’t always the same woman, but she almost always kissed them. The young man that opened the handbag shop would come by a lot later and would open the shop anywhere between nine and eleven in the morning. 

Hermione no longer actively kept tabs on these people. At first, she was concerned that they were Death Eaters in disguise, but after the first eighteen months she was able to dissuade herself of the idea while still watching them most mornings. She knew that she was reaching, but she was grateful for her more than a year of spying, as she knew when it was a Sunday because the pharmacist would not be there; she knew when it was a Thursday because the baker would close early and his small children would arrive with a woman Hermione assumed to be his wife. 

None of them, however, would ever be in a car that was in bad shape. A car that would backfire. There was one car that drove past the front of the apartments most mornings that needed its fan belt replaced as it made a high-pitched wailing as it drove down President de Rue, but none of the people in the building she watched had a bad car. It had been nearly a year since she had started waiting for them all to arrive every morning. She had once sat on the deep window sill of apartment five from four a.m. every day with a cup of tea and lemon marmalade on toast. Each time this was also where she would dump books that were of absolutely no use to her. A lot of these books believed that the only answer for Harry’s condition was an overdose of Sleeping Draught, and so this is where those particular idiots resided. So many idiots were there that six months into her living in Lyon, she was able to put her feet up on them. 

Hermione looked down at her feet, standing in her two well-worn places on the banister. Her balance there was so easy, well-practiced from the years of she’d climbed up there after anything had caught her off guard and led her to assume that she was under attack. This time she had been able to put off the ritual for more than an hour. She had walked quickly and quietly from where she was in apartment two to the window in apartment five. She hadn’t been in that room for so long that she hadn’t remembered that there were books organised all over the floor that only left one path. She stepped carefully around the piles of tomes and made it to the window just in time to see the woman who ran the pharmacy, this time with a new woman in a very old and unloved car. Hermione’s first thought had been that she thought the pharmacist could do better; she had seen the women that had been with her before and this woman seemed to be a step down and then she laughed.

Her second thought was Bellatrix Lestrange. It was the cursed knife going through her skin and the dark magic spitting her body in half. She had been able to shuffle her thoughts in such a way that Bellatrix was easily put back in her proper place, but she kept escaping. She could remember a time a cackle had interrupted Hermione’s walk back to the Muggle textbook on muscle atrophy that she had been reading, and it had continued to poke at her until she had made her way to the banister. 

She had already said goodbye to Harry—she’d done so while climbing up onto the banister for efficiency. Then Ginny, Luna, and Ron. This time she had been able to keep her goodbyes short. Her imagined obituaries were well-practiced - kind and funny but a different and occasional kind and funny visitor came to her mind this time. 

Seamus. Seamus Finnegan, who was already dead. Who had been caught in the crossfire as they escaped Hogwarts in 1998, who had died with a smile on his face as he made a joke about Neville killing the snake, Nagini. Seamus, who was a bright light, annoying and always in your face but warm and reassuring in the darkness. Seamus, who, when he died, had caused a ripple effect of devastation amongst his friends. It was the last time any of them had seen Ron; it was the last thing that happened before Dean Thomas had Apparated to his parents’ home near the Holloway Road Station and found them already dead— _ Avada Kadava _ —causing him to have to be restrained and kept in Caerphilly with Charlie until about a year ago when he started to talk again. Seamus, who Hermione always thought of as the first casualty of this new ,slow war that others were fighting and she was researching a way to end. He was the only person that people found it difficult to speak of. So many had died, and yet even Neville… 

Neville. Neville, who had found himself the head of this army they had decided to become. Neville, who had fallen in love with a girl who saw the future and was following her blindly into that future. Neville, who, five months ago, had travelled to Lyon, stood on the roof opposite her living room and sent his Patronus through the walls to stop her from getting even the smallest thing that she wanted. She had found herself hating Neville a lot recently. Not only that he was able to travel to France and not even come to see her—all she had seen from her kitchen window after Remus had rejected her was the tall man running from the edge of the building to Apparate on the other side of the building—but also that he had interrupted the moment she had been dreaming of for more than a year. He had spooked Remus and caused him to run when she could feel the ghost of his lips on hers. 

Remus. He had left her. He had wanted her and left her. He may have only wanted her because she was there and willing, but she would take what she could get when she could count the people she had seen face to face in nearly four years on two hands. He had been there, warm and alluring, and his eyes shifting to gold had made her salivate and then he was gone. 

_ Tap tap tap.  _

Hermione fell backwards with the image of Remus’ lips so close to her face that they were all she could see. Her coccyx hit the wooden floor hard and pain flashed from her spine to the tips of her fingers, she had to lean back to regain her breath. When she opened her eyes, still lying prone on the floor of the landing, she could see, although upside down, an owl waiting for her at the back windows of the foyer. Her pain was forgotten with the promise of that owl. 

It promised a visitor. 

She scrambled up onto her hands and knees and then to a standing position. The owl continued to tap on the window until her hands were at the latch for the window, and then it pecked at her hands while she tried to unravel the small piece of parchment from its leg. The owl flew so quickly away once it was free of its message that Hermione wondered if it had never been there in the first place. The only proof she had was the tiny scroll in her hand that she had already unravelled but hadn’t looked at yet. It almost didn’t matter who was coming because she had been alone for months—for nearly half a year—but someone was coming. And it did matter because when she looked down and saw the name, Hermione knew it was the only name she wanted it to be. 

_ Ginny, by train.  _

**Elgin, April 2002**

Draco was lost. He always was whenever Ginny was sent away. Every time that weird, tiny blonde girl walked into their rooms at their permanent safe house, his brain felt like it was swimming in renewed misery. He couldn’t remember when he had started to love Ginny. When he had started to comfort her, when comforting her had started to make him feel better. He had loved Potter for as long as he had hated him. The hate had melted away when Harry had offered to help him, offered to save him from the Fiendfyre. When their hands met, Harry’s hands somehow cold in the impossibly hot room that had burnt around them, the hatred had poured away and left nothing but love in its place. 

Not that he’d told anyone, but somehow Lovegood knew. She’d taken his hand and pulled him towards Harry’s lifeless body, insisting that Draco be the one to help him. The image of Harry on the ground, breath so shallow his chest hardly moved, didn’t bother him anymore. Draco hadn’t seen Harry’s eyes open, hadn’t seen his body move of its own volition in four years. Sometimes, Draco thought his fingers moved, but it was often Draco’s own shaking hands that were causing the stir. 

When he looked at Harry now, calm and serene, he thought that watching him move, talk and think would be the strange thing. If that ever happened. 

People had fought to keep Draco from him, only letting him in the room when he had a new potion ready for their savior. Food replacement, keeping him hydrated and holding malnutrition at bay. Draco had been fine to only see Harry in those fleeting moments that he had been called to administer the potions. Slowly though, as people got used to him and Ginny had relied on him more heavily, he had been allowed to stay longer. 

As the first six months sped by, Lovegood and Longbottom sending people here, there and everywhere, Draco was slowly but suddenly sleeping in Harry’s room with Ginny. He would watch her wake in the night next to Harry, feel his temperature and talk to him, sometimes she would cry. He would lay completely still, watching her touch Harry the way he wanted to touch him. Sometimes, he would cry as well. 

Until she was sent away. 

Lovegood had been certain Ginny was the only one who could do this, the only one who would know how to help Granger. Draco had watched Ginny scream and weep and punch Longbottom’s chest as the taller Gryffindor had held her against him. He was Ginny’s closest friend; Ron had been missing since the Battle and presumed dead. Longbottom was her only pillar of real friendship, and so when he turned to her and said, “George won’t speak to anyone, he won’t come back from Dusseldorf. You need to bring him home,” she went. 

Ginny left, and Draco hated her for it. Hated that she would leave Harry, that she would leave him. He hated that he missed her, and he hated that when he climbed into the same bed as Harry that he knew she would come back and he would be relegated to the single mattress on an old bed frame. He hated that he wanted her to come back, not to Harry but to him. 

It had taken her six weeks to convince her brother to come back to Scotland, to talk him off a cliff edge. To trust that he would get the four Portkeys it would take to get them back to Harry, back to him. Draco had been asleep, his lips settled against the ball of Harry’s shoulder—not in a kiss but for the simple contact. He had slept that way for six weeks, a modified charm on a glass of water on the side table set to vibrate when someone was near the door so he could quickly get into his old bed that had been cold and empty since she had left. 

When he woke, when his time was up, she was standing at the end of the bed. She looked awful, exhausted. Dark black-blue circles starting on either side of her nose framed her eyes, and even in the darkness of the room, he could see that she had lost weight. She looked at him thenat Harry, and then just sat down in a chair in the corner of the room. Draco had removed himself from the bed, ensuring Harry was still warm and still breathing, and padded over to a small dark wood cabinet that was at the end of his old bed. Muttering a weak  _ Lumos _ to find what he was looking for, he slowly walked over to her. Like approaching an animal he didn’t know, he quietly placed three glass vials on the floor by her feet and kneeled so he could better see her face. She stared at him, expressionless but without resistance as he unlaced her shoes and took the filthy socks off her feet. 

Summoning a large bowl of water and warming it, he kept glancing back at her face as she continued to stare at him. Her features were slowly morphing to ask a question—to which his only answer was that he didn’t know—so he shrugged before rolling up the bottoms of her cotton trousers and lifting her feet into the bowl. He added the first vial to the bowl as well, a mild relaxation draught that should affect her whole body when it was absorbed by the soles of her feet. 

The next time he looked up at her, she placed her tiny, dirty hand against his cheekbone, something that would have made him flinch reflexively a year ago, and he leaned into her touch. He could see the tears in her eyes, and he could feel the same in his. That isn’t when he started loving her—it had already happened. Maybe it had even happened while she was away, saving one of the brothers that she had left, but it was two and a half years ago now, and he still did. He loved her. 

He could feel a growl lifting in his throat but he had to stay quiet. He knew Lovegood trusted him, but she was only one of two of them that did. He could only steal glances; he could only touch her in secret. Kiss her, kiss Harry, in secret. He would be separated from them if anyone else knew—if anyone else even suspected, they would think it was a Death Eater trap and he would be back to the room downstairs to be summoned at will. 

He wanted to scream with her; he wanted them to know the grief that they caused her when they made her go away. But he stayed silent, watching Lovegood and Longbottom, this time accompanied by the wolf Lupin, as they slowly explained what Ginny’s mission was. Explained that they knew she didn’t want to leave, she was the last on their list, that they wouldn’t ask but everyone else was away. The six of them in this room were the only Order members left in Scotland. 

Draco knew what their dwindling numbers meant; he was untrusted. Harry was unconscious, the full moon was tomorrow night, which left her. 

Ginny. 

When he thought her name, his chest tightened, the rest of the conversation carrying on around him. He sat on the single bed, the bed they all thought was his, and he stared at the floor. He couldn’t look at Harry, couldn’t look at her—he would give himself away. He would lose control. It was when she saw them to the door and Lupin spoke to her under his breath that Draco moved. He tried to find a reason to be closer, so he could hear. 

“Hermione is alone, Gin. She is an incredible mind, the brightest witch of her age, but she is not immune to loneliness. No one has been able to get to her for three months. She is your friend; she will be glad to see you. You can…” The werewolf, barely but definitely, looked Draco in the eye. “You can talk to her, confide in her.” Lupin obviously thought that Ginny couldn’t confide in Draco, that Ginny still tolerated him so that Harry was healthy and safe. 

Lupin was a moron then. 

The door clicked shut, and she spun on her heel, half running and half falling into Draco’s arms. Crying again now—they cried all the time. She sought out comfort, and he gave it, lightly kissing her temple, but the water on the side table was still trembling slightly, so people were still near. He only fully encapsulated her in his arms when the surface of the water was still. 

He buried his face in her hair; he inhaled her scent. She smelt like spring—she always did. He could see blue skies and pink blossoms in the crook of her neck where his eyes were as she shook her sobs into his hair. He slowly pulled her legs up and carried her over to the chair next to Harry in the bed. They both quietly watched him for a bit, but with her, in his lap, he felt comforted. The weight of her against his body meant she wasn’t gone yet. 

“Do they know if Granger has news?” he asked after a while when they had both calmed down and she had relaxed with her head on his shoulder. She shook her head a little, but he could feel it. He resented them sending her if there was no news, no way of knowing if Granger had found an answer to waking Harry. So what if Granger was lonely? They all had problems. They had been at war for five years; she should be grateful she was just lonely. 

“I miss her though,” Ginny said, leaning forward to touch Harry's hand. “I bet he misses her too. It will be nice to have things to tell him about her.” 

Draco envied this side to her personality. She was able to find something to feel hopeful about; she never doubted that she would come back to him, to them. Draco doubted that all the time. It had been four years since the three of them had been stuck in this place, and she had been sent away five times. He had  _ mourned _ her five times, too stuck in the grief and disheartened by the war to even consider that she would be back. He would cling to Harry as he cried. 

“I will miss you,” he said quietly. Very rarely did he say such things out loud. He knew that she trusted his feelings for her. She loved him; he loved her. They both loved Harry. But he wanted her to have a memory of him saying it. “I love you,” he whispered, not to her but to both of them. She pulled herself against him tighter. He knew she wouldn’t say it back—he didn’t need her to. She had to have that memory, though; he knew she did. 

She left the following morning, padding out the door before Draco awoke and, left a note that he wouldn’t read right away. Not when the room still smelt of her, not when her scent lingered on Harry’s skin. He was tired of loving Harry but not being able to talk to him. He was tired of loving Ginny but not being able to protect her from being sent to her death by her stupid friends. He was tired of Lovegood wandering around this place with danger written in her dreamy expression. Pulling himself closer to Harry’s pliant body, he felt the tears on his face before he knew he was crying. He saw the drips of his tears against Harry’s dark blue t-shirt. 

Mostly, he was just tired.


	4. Chapter 4

**Lyon, April 2002**

Ginny caught a glimpse of ashy brown curls over the top of someone waving to a friend across the arrivals section of Gare-de-Lyon. Hermione was reading a Muggle book with her back leaning solidly against a pillar near the front entrance of the station. She looked so normal that Ginny wondered if everyone else screamed  _ MAGIC  _ whenever they moved about in Muggle spaces, which was more and more these days. 

The weather was cool; Hermione had a beige wool scarf around her neck and a camel wool coat wrapped around her body. Ginny, had a big black padded coat that protected every bit of her from the chill slipping through the large glass doors. When Hermione spotted her, she acknowledged her with only a blink before she turned around and walked out the entrance to the station. They both walked, maybe fifty feet apart, across a large stone square and several roads with Muggle buses and trams starting and stopping. When she saw Hermione walk past the entrance to a shopping centre and down an alley that looked to be for a disused car park, Ginny was relieved that she wouldn’t have to follow her friend at a distance for too long. 

Ginny saw her friend’s silhouette against the white stone of the building at their side before the other witch turned around, launching themselves at one another, they both held each other hard and firm. Both of them clung to each other as if to assure the other that they really were there. They both laughed, their eyes swimming with tears before Ginny’s crying turned to sobs. The joy she had felt at seeing her old friend was replaced quickly by her overwhelming anxiety for Harry and Draco. 

“It’s okay. It must be rotten being separated from him like this. Sometimes I think it’s better that I haven’t seen him in four years, you know, like he is,” Hermione said quietly, her words coming out quickly. Ginny sniffed, suddenly aware that Hermione only knew half the reason she was crying and decided at that moment that she would tell Hermione about Draco. Draco was so worried about telling people, about others seeing him comfort her. She knew that he was worried about the trust he had built—or the lack thereof. But Hermione was one of her oldest friends; she would understand. She would have to. “Come on, hold my hand,” Hermione said, helping Ginny steady herself before Side-Along Apparating them to an alley that was next to a long, wide river. 

Hermione led her up a street that was parallel to the river before tapping her wand lightly against a huge set of wooden double doors. The doors unlocked with a soft click. both women stood in the hallway, and a large, black dog appeared, growling, in the middle of the space. It looked so much like Padfoot, like Sirius, that Ginny almost took an excited step forwards. She hadn’t seen Harry’s godfather in months, maybe a year. But Hermione’s arm wrapped around her wrist in a tense grip that made Ginny lose faith in herself. 

“My name is Hermione Granger, secret keeper of 4 Rue de President Carnot and researcher for The Order of the Phoenix. You will not harm Ginevra Weasley.” Hermione had spoken so loudly compared to their soft, whispered chatter through the street that Ginny thought she might jump, but just as fast as the black dog had appeared, it sank through the floor, melting into the black marble of the foyer. “Come on,” she said, taking Ginny’s hand and passing a sage green Muggle lift. The building was not a house; it was a series of flats. 

“Did you create that... thing?” Ginny asked, taking a deep breath as they reached the very top of the main stairs. It was funny how being trapped in a room with only a bed and an armchair didn’t make one fit for climbing several staircases. Hermione opened a door to their left that hid a tiny but laughably steep staircase. “You have to be kidding,” Ginny breathed as she went to follow her friend through the entrance and up those stairs. They were so steep that she seemed to be on her hands and knees as she climbed towards a plain white gloss door. 

“You get used to it,” Hermione responded with a laugh as she used a Muggle key to open the door to their final destination. A small hallway, only big enough to keep the two witches, lead through to a long, narrow living space. 

“Tea?” Hermione said, taking off her coat and scarf at a small dining table next to a wall covered with kitchen units and a cast-iron oven and hob. Ginny nodded and smiled as she took off her layers. Although it felt like her skin was tugging her somewhere else, somewhere closer to Harry and Draco, she felt good to be somewhere that wasn’t the safe house she was kept in. She stretched her arms and legs all at once as she sat down on a huge old sofa that was impossibly comfortable. Bringing her legs under her, she watched her friend, who she hadn’t seen in more than three years, since they had found this safe house for her. When they had made contacts with magical booksellers in southern France, Hermione had been the obvious choice to protect the Order’s research but it had meant Ginny being without her.

“Why are you staring at the back of my head, Ginny Weasley?” Hermione said with a smile in her voice as she poured hot water into a teapot and two mugs floated their way over the coffee table in front of Ginny. 

“I can’t quite believe you’re actually here. It’s been years, Hermione. I want to know how you are though. What's it been like here?” Ginny blushed as her friend gave her a little wild look. They both knew there was somehow too much and not enough to talk about. There was a time where they had seen each other every day, talked every day. There had been no need to talk about their lives because they were experiencing them together, surviving together. Hermione had been one of the only people who trusted Ginny’s instincts with Draco, who trusted Draco’s talents enough for the Slytherin to be allowed to help Harry and so suddenly there it was. “I’m in love with Draco Malfoy.”

Hermione spilled the hot water all over the coffee table, missing the cups and pouring all over a set of parchments. She rocketed from her seat trying to save her notes but still shot a wide-eyed look at Ginny, who was contemplating if she had meant to say that out loud. 

“I’m sorry, Gin, but what?” Hermione asked quietly, no longer making eye contact and worrying her lip as she carefully poured the tea. 

“I’m in love,” Ginny said, holding her nerve if only because it meant she didn’t lose it, “with Draco Malfoy. Just before you left, he’d started sleeping in our room? Do you remember? Anyway, he was helping me keep Harry’s temperature steady through the night; it was so uncertain back then. We didn’t know if Harry would be able to stay alive being unconscious for that long. Draco, he was working day and night on those potions that would keep him going and researching all the time to come up with long-term treatments so we could keep Harry alive. He loves him, Hermione. Draco loves him.” She had been speaking too fast, too high-pitched, but Hermione seemed to be following because her eyebrows knitted together. 

“I knew that I think,” Hermione said, and Ginny had never felt so relieved. Concerned understanding shined from her friend’s gaze. No anger, no revulsion but a sense of curiosity. Ginny knew that Hermione had been the right person to tell. “I knew that Malf…  _ Draco _ was in love with Harry. They had been fixated on each other for too long, too intensely,” Hermione said softly, almost like she was apologizing. 

Ginny sighed. Of course, Hermione would think that Ginny was concerned or maybe even jealous, and perhaps she should be, but she just wasn’t. Ginny had also thought that Harry’s obsession with Draco was beyond a rivalry—it had more feeling behind it than schoolboys who didn’t like each other—but it wasn’t until she had seen Draco caring for her boyfriend, seeing Draco doing anything he could to save him, that she had seen just what that feeling was. “You— you too though?” Hermione whispered, breaking Ginny out of her thoughts. 

“Yes, me too. Don’t know when or how. I came home from when Georgie nearly— well, from getting George home and Draco started to look after me. I had always seen him look after Harry, but he started to care for me too.” She felt her eyes glaze over. 

“George... you mean this has been happening for—” Hermione counted on her fingers “—nearly three and a half years?” Hermione asked, slightly louder than before. 

“Oh, you heard about George?” Ginny asked, quickly distracted. 

“Please, the only person who hasn’t come through this place in the last four years is Harry.” Hermione laughed and then, like a sneeze escaping, sobbed involuntarily. 

Ginny let her though; they all cried all the time now. It was only a couple of minutes before Hermione went from kneeling on the other side of the coffee table to sitting on the sofa, took a deep breath and then looked Ginny in the eyes, clear of tears. “This puts me almost kissing Remus at New Years to shame,” Hermione said, sighing and smirking.

“You almost kissed Remus?!” 

The look on Hermione’s face told Ginny that she had purposefully given her most salacious piece of information to pull them momentarily from their sadness. 

Not certain whether she was allowed to ask any follow-up questions or whether Hermione wanted to be grilled the way Ginny wanted, she leaned back, crossing her arms. 

“It was New Years?” Hermione said, avoiding eye contact.

Ginny barked a short laugh as Hermione put her hands over her face. 

“Well now you have to tell me everything,” Ginny said, knowing that Hermione might need pushing. The Hermione that she had known four years ago would have never even confessed a crush let alone told Ginny about an almost-kiss with someone almost twice their age. Ginny briefly thought of her own situation, stealing kisses from Draco while her other boyfriend lay sleeping next to them, only ever responding to sexual needs when she and Draco were both beside themselves. They both knew that the days following the quick but mind-blowing fumbles with hands and mouths would be full of guilt and shame, catching each other crying in different corners of the safe house. 

But she knew that this wasn’t the same Hermione in the same way that Ginny herself wasn’t the same. She would be understanding of Hermione nearly kissing their forty-year-old ex-professor in response to Hermione’s quiet understanding of the situation Ginny was in with Harry and Draco. 

“There’s hardly anything to tell. We were talking, I was updating him on what I knew and he was updating me on what I was allowed to know.” Hermione trailed off with a roll of her eyes but a blush had developed from her neck to the tips of her cheekbones.“We’ve always gotten along very well. He likes reading as I do; he uses Muggle references that only we understand. Not to mention that I have been… lonely.” It was Hermione’s turn to talk too fast but she was flushed and smiling. “He was leaving early the next morning… we didn’t even get the allotted twenty-four hours.” She looked down and her shoulders followed, disappointment dripped from her features. “I think I scared him off.”

“He might have scared himself. I mean, Tonks…?” 

They both said Tonks’ name together, but Hermione had both hands over her face. Ginny laughed and pulled Hermione’s hands away. “You don’t think I'm mad?” Ginny asked her friend, both knowing that they were no longer talking about almost-kisses with ex-professors but about real kisses with ex-Death Eaters. 

“I don’t think you’re mad. I might have to see it for myself one day, but I believe you when you say you love him.” Hermione said. 

Ginny understood what she meant. It may be that Hermione never saw Harry ever again. Not the real Harry. Hermione could be found any day now, completely on her own in Lyon. Death Eaters could find her and kill her in the months between visits from The Order. She was risking everything to keep herself, these books, and her brain safe so that she could help save Harry. 

They slowly transitioned into more comfortable conversation territory, talking through everything the other had missed. Surprisingly, Hermione knew more than Ginny did. Hermione had visitors from all over Europe that she owled frequently. Ginny suddenly understood that the only people she spoke to were Draco, Luna, Neville, and Harry’s face. She was so isolated, and she knew so little. 

She hadn’t known that Charlie had a secret-girlfriend, that Dean Thomas having relapsed into misery was safe in the care of her remaining twin brother. What was worse was that Hermione didn’t have the information that Ginny needed. She wasn’t any closer to finding a cure for Harry, no one had found Ron, and Hermione couldn’t come home. Hermione was sacrificing having the pretense of a normal life, that she couldn’t actually kiss Remus if she wanted to. 

At the moment it was all for nothing. 

Ginny pushed down the anger this instilled in her. 

\-----

The two women talked for as long as their energy would allow. They went through lists of the people they knew and tried to make full timelines for everyone using their combined knowledge. Ginny had filled in the gaps that Hermione had from her correspondence and infrequent visitors.

Ginny had fallen asleep first as Hermione had circled back to Remus for the third or fourth time, and it was only when her friend started snoring softly that Hermione had realised that she was exhausted too. She stood up and walked through the small doorway to her room where a comfort-charmed mattress sat on the floor with sheets in the semblance of a made bed. She couldn't remember putting her on pyjamas or getting into bed, but that was how she found herself the next morning.

There was a shuffle outside the window that sat high, snug amongst the eaves of her bedroom woke her. Her small double mattress pushed into the opposite corner. It felt like a real-life before she’d moved into this room; she felt like she’d had a purpose. 

She would wake in a large bed in a large beautiful flat before the books started to arrive. Every time a member of The Order found a book even slightly related to Harry’s condition or comas or even Hocruxes still, they would arrive in the small dumb waiter at the bottom of the stairs. Almost every day at one point, books would turn up, she would read those books, find that they weren’t useful and then she would file them away into one of the other apartments. 

She stood from her mattress on the floor and pushed both arms to the sky until each shoulder gave a satisfying  _ click _ . Her pajamas were a little thin for how chilly it would be outside, but her temperature-charmed flat meant that unless she went outside to collect a visitor, she would very rarely have to dress for the weather. 

She turned to the shuffling noise at the window again to see a small, pale brown kniffler. Blossom would go out at night, climbing down the rain gutters that held onto the side of the four-floor building, but she’d always come home in the morning, always carrying a galleon. With a smile, Hermione scooped up the creature and put Blossom on her shoulder, walking into the living area of the flat. She turned to see Ginny, snoring strongly with both arms over her face and wondered when the last time her friend had slept through the night. 

Ginny’s news last night had been unexpected but not unwelcome. Hermione had often worried that her friend was not being cared for at home, that maybe she was overcome with the loneliness that overcame Hermione in between visitors, but Ginny had found a way to stay loved and to love. Hermione had seen the way Draco had been changed by Harry’s condition, that he was the only one amongst the people in that little safe house in Scotland with the skill to help her best friend. If Draco had continued to change for the better, continued to enjoy caring for people, Hermione could see how he could be appealing. 

A quick  _ Tempus  _ showed her that it was half-past seven in the morning. Ginny only had another hour in bed before they would need to organize her travel home. Before Hermione would need to get herself in the right frame of mind to say goodbye to another visitor. She stifled her sadness as she put the kettle on the stovetop. Making sure the grill was still hot from where she had filled the centre of the medieval device with coal, she also put four slices of bread to toast. When she had reached into the cupboard for butter and lemon marmalade, she noticed that Ginny was awake and watching her. 

“Will there be a time during your trip where you don’t stare at me in my kitchen?” Hermione teased, turning round to flip the toasting bread. The kettle began a slow whistle, so she took it off the hob and put it down on a cork disk on the kitchen counter. Taking out the teapot, an item she despised when she didn’t have visitors, she dropped in the tea bags and poured the hot water over top, then turned back round to where Ginny was turning a galleon over and over in her hands. But it wasn’t a real galleon. Blossom apparently also saw the coin in Ginny’s hands, leaping off her shoulder with a squeak of greed, and Hermione plucked her out of the air in her attack for the bounty and plopped her down on her bed before closing her bedroom door. Only a small whine came from behind the door before Hermione heard a small snore where Blossom had fallen quickly asleep. 

“I think I can see what Remus does, you know?” Ginny said sitting up from the sofa she had slept on, cracking her back in a funny mirror of Hermione’s waking routine. 

“Excuse me?” Hermione said laughing under her breath as she brought the tea and now slightly burnt toast over with the butter and lemon marmalade floating behind her. 

“You’re hot, Hermione,” Ginny said, giggling at her friend’s reaction. “No wonder Remus nearly fell for your charms.” 

Hermione was speechless; she’d nearly forgotten that they had spoken again about Remus last night. About the guilt that Hermione had felt knowing that Remus still loved his wife that had died by his side. How she had decided that it had been a moment of weakness and nostalgia on both of their parts and that it wouldn’t happen again. 

Quickly, Hermione changed the subject. They ate their breakfast while Hermione showed Ginny on a map where the witch would Apparate to purchase her train ticket back to Paris, where they both knew a Portkey would be waiting for her. They continued their conversation, making promises about the future that neither of them would be able to keep.

“It’s a shame, you know. Remus,” Ginny said as she was walking out the door in the main foyer. “Maybe if you could read his mind, you’d know if you needed to feel bad or not.” 

The lock of the door clicked and so did something in Hermione’s mind.

_ Of course.  _

“OF COURSE,” Hermione yelled into the echo of the foyer. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A super, massive, GIANT thank you goes out to [Ravenslight](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ravenslight/pseuds/ravenslight) this week for against all odds getting to my little fic and devoting her time to it despite more important things happening in her life and the lives of those around her.


	5. Chapter 5

**Lyon, May 2002**

_Malcolm Morcombe in 1682 founded many of the Laws of Legilimency that we still abide by today. Primarily, he discovered that you cannot enter a person’s mind and view it objectively. You are not able to take what you see in a wizard’s thoughts as the truth or even reliable; though a wizard is unable to lie without the use of occlumency, he is only able to show you what he believes to be the truth._

Hermione wrote a line in her notes about perception and then carried on with the passage. This book, although more thoroughly researched and up to date, it didn’t say anything more than she had been reading since she received the first book on advanced Legilimency a few days after Ginny had left in May. 

At the time, she had written the word on a piece of parchment and tied it to the leg of an owl that had arrived with three shrunken texts that she had requested the week before. She’d no longer felt able to request particular texts, but she had hoped that Luna or someone would know well enough to send her _Legality & Legilimency b_y Fredrick Glamoran or _Mysteries of the Mind_ by Ursella Udgens because it had felt like something useful. This thought and the thoughts she’d had after Ginny had mentioned mind reading upon her departure felt like a step in the right direction with every gap the theory filled, it felt more right. 

She had seen the texts she originally wanted in the index of a textbook on the Unforgivables that she’d had since her fourth year but had never thought to even try either Legilimency or Occlumency since Harry’s experience with Professor Snape. For some reason, she believed that both of these forms of magic were almost dark and they were not for her, but she knew that she was capable of dark or almost-dark magic when needed. The curses she had sent at Death Eaters at Hogwarts were intended to harm. When she was at her most terrified at night, she would practice how she would need to feel to perform a killing curse. She knew she was capable of darkness for the sake of the light, but that didn’t mean that she had known exactly how or what to do. 

Hermione knew that Legilimency theory was on the seventh year defense syllabus, and she had done the reading necessary, but the theory never included the practical. It only ever described saying the word and then what a person would have experienced, which was almost always anecdotal. When she had become bored in their fifth year and had researched seventh-year defense, she found that almost everything but Legilimency was included in their N.E.W.T. exams. No one ever expected a group of seventeen and eighteen-year-old students to accurately and successfully perform such an advanced display of magic. 

_Occlumency is often thought of as the natural following course of study for any witch or wizard that has been studying Legilimency, though this is only partly the case. Most scholars who have made the wizarding mind their life’s work would state that studying Occlumency is the more logical starting point then Legilimency. You can perform Legilimency without much skill. You may, of course, forever damage the mind of those you choose to practice on, and the pain can cause some to claim that they have actually been under the Cruciatus curse, but you can successfully perform it whenever you’d like._

_On the other hand, if you would like to practice Occlumency, you are entering a lifelong vocation that you may never be able to achieve, or once achieved, you may never be able to stop. You must build a whole world in your mind that is designed to not only confuse anyone who may go poking around in your inner self but also trick others into believing something that is not true. It has been known for those who are skilled in occlumency to no longer be able to testify to the Wizengamot or questioned by Aurors without the use of Veritaserum._

She picked up a book on practical Occlumency that had arrived that morning and opened it to the first page of the first chapter. 

_In order for a witch or wizard to successfully achieve Occlumency, they must be able to picture this environment wholly in your mind. If the skirting board is dusty, how much dust is there? Are there windows that open outwards or inwards? Or perhaps they don’t open at all. If they were to move from place to place in their mind, they must be able to know what the floor feels like beneath their feet and what temperature changes from where they were to where they were going._

Hermione knew what she would need to picture to achieve this. She took the book with her to sit with her back to the short radiator under the windows at the back of the large foyer of the apartments. This would be what she would picture. 

She could picture which of the steps were looser than others up either of the three flights of stairs. She could perfectly imagine the change in temperature from the areas that had a rug or carpeting beneath her feet to those that were just the shiny, lacquered floor. She could draw from memory that wall that faced where she would stand on the banister. 

It hadn’t been any large noises that had led her to the banister since she had considered Legilimency. No pigeons hitting windows or anyone shouting to a friend outside. There had only been the explosion of the notion in Hermione’s head that she didn’t know Occlumency. She had absolutely no way of shielding herself against a Death Eater who knew Legilimency. She was a weak link, endangering everyone she loved and millions of people she barely knew just by this cavernous gap in her knowledge.

Hermione took a deep breath and, remaining sitting on the floor of the landing, closed her eyes and saw the wall that was well above her head and opposite the high arch of the room. She could imagine how the worn parts of the banister beneath her feet would feel, and she could look down and see the floor of the entrance floor. With a small nod to herself, she confirmed that she would build a world from the perfect copy of the apartments that she could recreate inside her own head. 

After creating the building’s facade, the first person that she created was Ron. She could never bring herself to truly believe that he may have been dead, so she would keep him alive in Apartment 3. 

_She crouched on the banister and pushed her legs off the side so that she could stand in front of where her real body stood. She walked to her right to the stairs that started outside the doorway to Apartment 5 and walked down the stairs to where, at the entrance of Apartment 3, stood Ron with the Gryffindor Sword and the destroyed Hufflepuff’s locket; soaking wet from saving Harry’s life._

  
  


**Bruges**

When Remus had arrived in Bruges three days prior, he hadn’t expected to stay so long. He usually came and did what every member of the Order did. Checked for signs of a break-in to the property, ensured the fridge was full of food and stocked with any potions that required chilling, and then determined that all the necessary potions were in stock and still usable in the hallway cabinet.

As he was tallying the inventory in the cabinet, he heard the familiar wheeze that came from the makeshift bedroom down the hall and followed it. 

_He better not be dead,_ Moony whispered, in a way that made Remus think that his wolf probably didn’t care either way.

_He won’t be dead; I can hear his breathing,_ Remus reassured himself. 

_He better not be dying then. I hate it when they die._

Remus could do nothing but agree with Moony. The throb of worry that came from deep in his chest wouldn’t stop until he’d seen him with his own eyes. When he entered a room that was probably once someone’s dining room, all seemed to be as it should. A large four poster bed stood in the middle of the room with a few tables at either side, all of them covered with books. These were similar books to the ones Hermione kept in the rooms of the apartments that were meant for medical study. 

_We could be with her, but you’re a coward._

He ignored Moony as he checked for any of the charms that would warn of a real emergency, but everything seemed to be calm and normal. 

After determining all was well, he peered through the window at the early morning winter, so quiet outside that he decided to settle into the comfortable armchair that sat by the foot of the bed for a nap. 

_This is a waste of time_ , Moony complained.

_This isn’t a waste of time; it is incredibly important that someone is here at all times, and Poppy needs a day off once in a while. He could die._ Remus sighed and thought slowly, not unlike he would to a frustrated child. 

_So what if he dies? People are dying all the time?_

_Is that not a reason to avoid more death?_ Remus replied, trying to put an end to this internal darkness. 

“Must you think so loudly, Lupin?” The low drawl came from the bed, and Remus looked up quickly and made eye contact with Severus Snape, now sat upright in his bed. 

“I don’t know, Severus. Must you listen to my private thoughts?” 

Severus looked like he would roll his eyes if he was able to, but as it was, the man had barely the energy to lift a hand. “You project so _loudly_ that I can barely escape that mongrel you keep tethered up in there.”

_Cunt_ , Moony replied, momentarily pushing through to make eye contact with the man in the bed. 

Remus laughed and put his feet up on the foot of the bed, and Snape looked deeply disturbed but must have needed to conserve his energy as he didn’t say anything. “Anything new, Severus? Been to any great parties?” 

“Oh, nothing too taxing. Do you have any updates other than your little fantasies about a girl half our age?” Severus looked quite pleased with himself, so Remus did nothing but roll his eyes in reply. 

Remus had visited Severus several times in the last three years; he was often the only one available when Poppy was needed elsewhere. They had an almost friendship, for men where one had accidentally almost mauled the other to death—twice. Remus felt comfortable around Severus, especially in his current condition. 

Severus was in better shape than Remus had seen him in a long time. The man’s open neck wound was still there, a stasis charm still intact that Hermione had cast on it more than three and a half years ago. They had all expected for it to fail at some point, since charms wear off or at least weaken over time, but this one seemed to last indefinitely. The giant fresh-old wound was only obvious if you knew it was there and really looked for it. Madam Pomfrey had put a notice-me-not on it a long time ago, hiding its appearance, and Remus imagined it just made her day a little easier. 

Usually, Severus looked almost dead—though Remus supposed he _was_ almost dead. It was difficult to remember when his cutting remarks were as active as they had once been, before he was permanently gravely injured. But recently, Severus had some colour in him, some pink in his cheeks. 

_She saved him, our witch. He owes her his life._ Moony was half proud and half disappointed that the object of their affections had saved their remaining rival. 

“Some life it is—laid in a bed and dying,” Severus replied to Moony. It might be that Snape was unable to turn off the Legilimency anymore, that his energy had sucked him dry of any control over his mind-reading, but he had always been able to see the wolf’s cogs turning behind Remus’ eyes, and for some reason, Remus had never minded. It always felt a little like a relief that he didn’t have to repress so much when he visited Bruges. 

“You’ll have to excuse Moony; he’s head over heels,” Remus joked and let out a puff of pretend laughter that might, if he was incredibly lucky, thrown Snape off the scent of his own feelings. “Are you all stocked on everything you need from out there?” 

Severus nodded, small but definitely, and it looked horribly painful. Remus watched him close his eyes and take a deep breath, a sign that the talking part of his visit was over for now. 

Remus settled into the chair and let his shoulder relax. For the first time since making his normal checks, he allowed his mind to wander. He had been in Barcelona for the past several weeks, seeking out a set of werewolves that lived in the city. They weren’t a pack, as they all resided separately in the city. Within the original set of Roman walls and those that were installed later on was an agreement with the magical folk of the city that no questions would be asked if no answers were given. This had meant a relatively peaceful time for the magical society of Barcelona, with even a few of the werewolves marrying humans without the disgusted looks and judgments that he and Dora had received. 

The peace in Barcelona had been interrupted when some Death Eaters had gone rogue and decided to try and recruit the werewolves to join Voldemort's influence across Europe. Not one member of the lycanthropic community there had taken them up on their offer, and it had ended in horrible violence. Remus had traveled there to look after several injured and confused families that had werewolves for a parent, sibling, or spouse. 

However, he had not once been able to get Hermione out of his mind in the heat of the city. Twice he had spotted petite women with dark curly hair and his heart had leapt. 

_I’m the one head over heels, am I?_ Moony countered.

“I have to agree with the dog, Lupin. It seems that you are just as infatuated,” Snape interrupted his personal debrief, and the men made eye contact again.

“It’s out of the question; she’s half my age,” Remus said and waved his hand in front of his face. “Besides, she’s trapped in that place, and I was the only person she had seen in months. She doesn’t want me, I was a means to an end.” Remus had made this argument to himself a million times; he was too old, and she was just strapped for choice—it was nothing. 

“As much as it thrills me to go through the particulars of your love life from my deathbed, you could be less purposefully obtuse—it would be quicker,” Severus drawled, and it felt more like they were bickering in Grimmauld Place than it had in a long time. Remus could remember hating Severus Snape; he could remember believing him to be bad and not trusting him, but all he’d felt since the battle at Hogwarts was how they would have all been dead without him. 

“Have you told her about Weasley?”

“Which Weasley?” Remus deflected, but he knew which Weasley Snape was referring to. He was the only Weasley they ever talked about. Severus only knew because Remus did, Severus could see and hear everything Remus had ever thought in this room, and if there was a man who could keep a secret then Snape was him. 

Severus disagreed with Luna’s strategy of secrecy and had said several times that Remus should tell Hermione everything because she would know what to do and would be right about it. Severus hadn’t said that in so many words—complimenting Hermione Granger still may have been something beyond his capability—but Remus knew what he had meant. 

“Fine,” Severus said, closing his eyes and revealing the exhaustion around his features. “I may not believe that witch to be the most beautiful and intelligent woman to have ever existed, but I know that if you told her what you know about that boy she would give you anything you asked for.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Firstly, a MASSIVE & late Happy Birthday to [Ravenslight](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ravenslight/pseuds/ravenslight) THE best Alphabeta I could have ever asked for. She recently finished her gamechanger [Queen of Swords](https://archiveofourown.org/works/18653347/chapters/44236462) and I cannot recommend it highly enough. 
> 
> Secondly, OH MY GOD isn't that artwork pretty?! The wonderful Erin made it for me and is stupidly talented. A ginormous thank you to her.


	6. Chapter 6

****

**Lyon, June 2002**

The feeling of unease that flowed over her like a roiling ocean started in the soles of her feet. It pushed her up off the sofa, out of chairs, around the apartments and powered her in laps of the stairs, her flat, and the foyer. It would eventually climb up her shins, a spider web of anxiety that throbbed against her skin. It wrapped itself around her thighs and wrecked her stomach as it climbed her torso. 

She had been sick three days ago and hadn’t eaten since in the knowledge that it could happen again. 

Hermione had been contemplating the conclusion she had come to somewhat peacefully. 

The Order were all dead; they had failed. She had failed. 

This had occurred to her before of course, she’d had reduced contact with them before but never nothing. She had sent an owl months ago and nothing. She had answers, had completed the research, and now she needed people to practice on. Occluding without someone to test limited her ability to improve. No owls, no Patronus, and no visitors. 

When was the last time she had spoken aloud? 

Maybe she was the reason that they had been found. She had sent an owl, something she had done before countless times, but this time might have been the one when the wrong person had spotted it. It had been the grey southern face owl that often nipped her hands a little when it was delivering to her, but he had arrived when she needed him, and she had thought nothing of attaching the note and letting him go. How stupid she had been, how naive. Somewhere she had been careless. Somehow a Death Eater had found the note or the owl or both and been able to trace them. 

A dry wretch wracked her body, spasming on the floor where she had fallen without realising. This was no good. 

She pushed herself upright, sitting cross-legged at the top landing with her eyes on where the well-worn patches on her banister would be. Her eyelids fluttered closed, concentrating on the building she’s erected in her mind.

_ When she opened her eyes, an identical scene sprawled before her, but her banister had no marks. She never needed to stand on them here. _

_ Remus would be where she had placed him, a dining room in one of the top floor apartments. Placed second after Ron, Remus had soon become the one she visited most often. She had forgotten, some nights, that he was in her mind.  _

_ At the start of her Occlusion, she would walk down the steps from the service apartment and stand on the top landing of the Lyon Apartments. Here, in her mind, it was always dark outside. It was a simulacrum so exact that the weather of the night outside was itself a recreation of a night that she had been unable to sleep the summer after she came here.  _

_ Hermione walked across the landing and into Apartment 7. The hallway in the top floor flats was a little longer than the others; they had one more bedroom and a study in the rear of each property, and it had taken her days to solidify them here. She very rarely went in them, as they kept a few of her most insane theories. In the study of Apartment 8, a small cursed knife sat on top of a desk. She didn’t like to keep her research into Bellatrix’s tools out and about in her mind, as it would often cause her to obsess for days, and she had managed to keep that obsession at bay after learning Occlumency. _

_ She walked past the doors to the third bedroom and the study and into the dining room where Remus sat at a polished mid-century chair and table. He often had books and newspapers to read, chocolate to eat. He looked up at her and smiled before pouring her a cup of tea into a mug that she hadn’t noticed before. She balked slightly at this flight of fancy as she knew she would be unable to drink the tea; it didn’t exist. Yet, Remus pouring her a cup of tea was just the comfort she needed.  _

_ “Hermione, you should sit down.”  _

_ “I don’t have time to sit down,” she snapped, looking around the room that he was kept in. There was a picture of Tonks here, as she was the last time that Hermione had a clear view of her. Bill & Fleur's wedding. Alongside Tonks’ photograph was that of a tiny baby that she had imagined with Remus’ eyes and turquoise hair. She had never seen Teddy, not even a picture, but she felt like she would need it to keep Remus happy. This man who never got to see his son, who didn’t get to know where he was kept.  _

_ “Ok, stay standing if you like but we have more than enough time.” Remus didn’t look up while he was talking but instead pulled out a bar of Dairy Milk from under a newspaper and started breaking it into pieces.  _

_ Hermione started to pace on her side of the room. _

_ “Everyone must be dead.” She presented this idea, this hypothesis, a lot like the way she would have done so during her early days of research in the Eglin safe house. She tried to remain calm but permitted herself to pace.  _

_ “I disagree,” he answered, not looking up from the newspaper before him. She had copied this gesture from his real behaviours when they were both in Eglin as well.  _

_ She could easily recreate the mannerisms and the language of these conversations, their debates over what was deemed a logical conclusion and what was not, because she held them close to her heart. They were some of the most meaningful interactions of her life that weren’t with Harry or Ron, and although she loved them both dearly, they couldn’t match Remus’ intellect.  _

_ She knew that she had created her Remus in this room not only for the ability to look at him and be around him but because he was her only available equal. Here, if anywhere, would be where she could figure out if something was the right decision, the correct path. He had helped her remember the names of books from the seventh year reading list that she had needed for her research into Occlumency. He had helped her create more convincing layouts of the apartments.  _

_ The part of him that lived in her mind showed her kindness that she was unable to show herself. He was able to talk her into valuing her life over her research, or lack thereof but he wouldn’t this time.  _

_ “Everyone must be dead,” she continued, “because it has been almost four months. It has been almost four months and the agreed period of time to be left as a warning was two. It was agreed with Luna and Neville before I left that should there be a problem, they wouldn’t contact me for two months and when they did contact me it would come with instructions. I have received no such communication.”  _

_ She turned to look at Remus again. He was pouring his tea once more, adding two lumps of brown sugar. Always brown and never white; it made for sweeter tea. He snapped another piece of Dairy Milk, his mother’s favorite, and placed it in his mouth before he looked her in the eye. His expression was of kind exasperation. She had come to him with the same conclusion when it had been three months, that she would need to prepare for her own death immediately, but he had convinced her to wait. He had convinced her that she should stay alive.  _

_ “Counter argument,” he began, never once looking away from her eyes. “Things are kept from you, are they not? You know that when people visit you, when you receive owls from people, that they do not give you the whole picture. You are given information that you are allowed to know. You are given information that is  _ safe  _ for you to know. Have you considered that there may not be information that is safe for you to have right now?”  _

_ She had thought of this. Of course, he only knew what she knew—he only thought what she thought—but sometimes when it came out of his mouth, when his unearthly compassion presented her information, it felt easier to digest. She had considered the reality that there wasn’t a safe way of communicating with her and knew what it implied, that she was in another sort of danger. That she was being watched, that someone knew where she was and for some reason was not doing anything about it.  _

_ “Should that be the case and that theory is in practice true, then I am still under threat. I should still take the ultimate step in ensuring the safety of The Order. I know that as a person I am not only my mind, but to my enemy that is all I am good for. To a Death Eater, I am what is between them and the knowledge of Harry and the rest of the Order’s locations.” _

_ “You know,” he said quickly, enforcing his earlier point. “You know as well as I do that you do not know where  _ everyone  _ is. You know where Luna, Neville, Draco, Ginny, Harry, George, Dean and Charlie are. That’s it. That’s  _ all _. Those people are irreplaceable—they are your family—but they are not the entire Order. For example, you don’t know where I am.”  _

_ She had thought about this several times in the last few days. Whenever she had wished that she had the real Remus, she had thought about where he could be. He had spoken about being in Berlin before and Barcelona, but she wouldn’t be much more help than a copy of  _ European Guide to Modern Werewolf Packs  _ by Chloe C’et _ . 

_ “Agreed, I don’t know where everyone is, but surely knowing where Harry is hidden is my only use anyway.” _

_ Remus made a small noise of complaint, and she looked down at him. His eyes were sad as he folded the newspaper in front of him and returned her gaze.  _

_ “I thought that we have already come to a conclusion on your theories of your worth,” he said plainly. “We agreed that your life is worth more than the information you hold. That your safety could be worth something, even if you are objectively not the most important person in the world. That you are allowed to be the most important person to someone, to yourself even.” _

_ “My subconscious makes you say that.” Hermione may have been a witch, but she knew the basics of fight or flight. Her brain had written a cheque her body didn’t want to cash. She had read many Muggle psychology books on people who had attempted to shoot themselves in the head, had pulled the trigger but somehow missed. Their body took over, keeping them alive when their mind wasn’t up to the task, but she also knew how Occlumency worked.  _

_ The more rooms she built, or more importantly the more walls she built, inside her mind, the more she would be able to keep from people. Consequently, she would also be able to keep from herself. She didn’t only keep her voice of reason in this room so she could talk to him but also so she could close and lock the door behind her. Once she had created Remus here, she saw the danger he posed to her carefully laid plans. Even two weeks from when she had originally sent word to Elgin, when she hadn’t heard anything and she had spoken to Remus when she was still building the apartments, he had been able to turn her from objective thought to self-preservation.  _

_ There were times when she was here and speaking with Remus that his likeness was too good. It got harder and harder, every time she used him as a way of debating ideas or theories, to leave him there.  _

_ She had been too accomplished at recreating him. She may never leave.  _

_ “You know it would destroy me.” His voice was quieter now. It held less confidence, but it was still Remus. It was still his gaze that skated over her skin like fingertips. He had stood up, something that she realised he had never done before, and he moved his teacup away from himself before putting both hands flat on the table in front of him. “You were never really that close with Luna. Neville is strong now; he’ll be okay. Draco only needed you to vouch for him, and he has Ginny for that now. Ginny… she will be livid with you, but she has a support system now, men that love her—she will survive. Harry won’t even know you’re gone, but me.  _ Remus _. I’ll never survive. You saw what Dora’s death did to me; you saw how difficult I found it to hold my child. You see that it’s easier to have his grandmother raise him in complete secrecy than it is for me to watch his hair change colour. You know that not only will I not survive you dying but also I’ll never forgive you. I’ll always be disappointed in you, your lack of resilience.”  _

_ These weren’t his words, but her mind was doing a good job of making her pause. His voice was cracking from a memory she had of his talking with her about his wife and son. Her body’s need to survive was throwing her most devastating memories of this man in her face. Outside her mind, she could feel real tears rolling down her cheeks though her eyes in the room with Remus stayed dry.  _

_ “You don’t love me. You’ll never care for me the way you did Tonks. I am a woman who was there when you were lonely and when you thought you’d be caught you ran from me. You ran from the shame of thinking I was desirable.” Her voice cracked as it strained to shout; she could feel her heartbeat in the hollow of her throat, and he advanced in tempo with it’s pace. She knew that if he followed her now, that his pragmatism, his optimism, would follow her and she would be unable to carry out what she must. She turned and bolted for the door, only just clicking it shut and locked before he slammed into the other side. She could hear and feel him banging against its wooden grain. Weakened by their exchange, she knew that even bringing this up was a mistake.  _

She opened her eyes, severing the Occlumency, and they stung with stale and fresh tears, she realised that she must be in the middle of what Muggles would call a panic attack. She was sweating through her clothes and could feel bile rising in her throat. Sucking in deep breaths until she thought she might pass out, she forced herself upright when she was calm enough to do so and approached the banister for what would be the final time. 

Hermione pulled herself up and steadied herself. There was no one to say goodbye to this time. Her ritual had wrung her dry of all grief for her friends and family well before that moment. She had thought maybe she would think of her parents the last time she did this, but they were safe, they were the only people she knew  _ were  _ safe. She thought of Remus’ eyes shifting from a stormy green sea to brilliant gold and then relaxed her knees to jump. 

_ Tap tap tap.  _

She didn’t turn immediately, thinking that all the noise in her heard was creating some sort of ticking. A countdown to the end of her life, but it happened again and she turned.

A wide faced brown owl with feathers missing on its left wing was on the ledge of the window, waiting. 

_ Tap tap tap.  _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I just wanted to say that I am in the middle of an extremely stressful personal situation at the moment and that this community has been a light for me that I cannot thank you enough for.


	7. Chapter 7

****

**Elgin, June 2002**

Ginny was sitting on Harry’s bed, propped up by some cushions at the end of the mattress as an informal chair so she could watch both men sleep. Draco would wake very soon; it was rare that she was awake before him. She noticed, the minute her eyes had adjusted to the light, the grey hue under one of Harry's eyes, and his pyjama trousers had fallen slightly at the hip. The first instinct she had was to vomit. The panic that wracked her whole body at a physical change in her dormant boyfriend made her feel dizzy. 

She had spent the few minutes between her realisation and Draco waking up cataloging the changes she had been too stupid, had felt too safe, to recognise before it was too late. This couldn’t have happened overnight; this would have been a slow process that she was powerless to stop, but Draco be able to do something. He was  _ always _ able to do something. 

“Gin,” Draco whispered, looking at her from where he laid out with a Ginny-sized space between him and Harry. “What's wrong?”

“He’s lost weight,” she said, but she could barely hear herself over the roar of her pulse through her ears. 

Draco sat up and climbed over the edge of the duvet to kneel at her feet. She wrapped her arms around her legs in front of her, and he placed his hands over her’s where they held her body tight. He looked away, gaze lingering over Harry before he met her eyes again with a pinch between his brows. 

Red rage blasted through her vision. He had noticed, and he hadn’t told her. He had noticed, and he hadn’t done anything. He had noticed, and she hadn’t. 

“It’s too fast,” Draco said, pushing a rogue strand of hair away from her face. His hand stayed in her hair, and she felt more rage that his touch comforted her. He had been keeping something from her, keeping the  _ only thing  _ that mattered from her, and his touch was still a comfort. His care was still all she wanted. 

“I didn’t notice,” Ginny said on an inhale, rocking where she sat. She felt a wooziness take over her as her blindness to the truth of their situation became more and more apparent. “You’ve already tried to stop it?”

“Since you returned from Lyon.” He nodded. 

“You didn’t tell me.” 

They both sat there in silence, her head in his hands, and she leaned into him. She could think of a lot of reasons he hadn’t told her. She could scream at him about any one of them, but what good would that do? 

“I’ll be right back,” Draco said and kissed her forehead. He laid her down at the end of the bed with the cushions still surrounding her. Ginny focused very carefully on the movements of Harry’s chest and the way his lips sometimes fluttered from breathing. It might have been a peaceful moment if she had been able to think about anything other than watching the love of her life die. 

\-----

“Look Lovegood, it’s time to get Granger to come back,” Draco said as he slammed through the doorway to where Luna sat at her desk with nothing in front of her but a chrysanthemum. The flower was toppling over and over again but never fell forwards or backward from the surface. 

“Dolohov is in Lyon,” Luna said clearly but softly with her eyes glued to the flower. “I can’t see a way in or out Draco.” Her voice remained light as a feather, but there was death and destruction in her eyes. The flower burned with no flame, blackened, and diminished as if it was in the middle of a bonfire. 

“Pot– Harry is losing weight.” Draco couldn’t face that he had said it out loud or that it was happening at all. It was only a quarter of an inch, but it had been an eighth two weeks ago. It was getting faster, and he couldn’t stop it. He wouldn’t have time to test another batch of potion at this rate of decay. 

“Dolohov is in Lyon, and Hermione is about to kill herself, and Harry is losing weight,” she said as she turned to her right just as the flower winked out of existence. Neville stood in the doorway that Draco thought might lead to their bedroom. 

Longbottom walked so that he stood close to Luna but not directly in her eye-line. Draco knew that she didn’t necessarily need eyes to do whatever she did but out of instinct none of them looked her in the eye when she was attempting to do— whatever she did. Neville spoke before Draco could even react.“Does Hermione know about Dolohov?” 

With a weary smile, Luna shook her head a little and then placed her hand on the broad plain of Neville’s torso. “Oh, absolutely not. She’d definitely jump if she knew.” 

_ Jump?  _ Draco didn’t know what any of this meant. Since when was Granger suicidal? She had her hidden life away from war and death, and she was protected. 

“Why is Granger going to commit suicide?” He wouldn’t have believed it, but this tiny fairy, idiot girl hadn’t been wrong yet. 

“She thinks we’re all dead.”

“Why the fuck would she thi—”

“Where is Remus?” Neville asked as he stepped between Draco and Luna. There were days when Draco truly resented that he had no power over Longbottom anymore. That once when they were children he could make the dark-haired boy cower with one look. Now, Draco was an ornament, an inconvenience to all of them—a necessary evil. He was an accessory to this conversation. 

Draco had come here to demand that Lovegood bring Granger back; it had been  _ months  _ since they had received the owl from Lyon that said she had news, yet they had been sitting on their hands. He had a purpose; he had to keep Harry alive, and it wasn’t working. He was going to fail and the last four years would be for nothing. Losing his life, falling in love with a  _ Weasley,  _ would be for nothing. 

“Who fucking cares where the werewolf is, Longbottom?! Why does Granger think we’re dead?” 

He was ignored again in favour of some sort of intense eye conversation Luna and Neville were having. 

“Remus is in Lille.”

\-----

**Lille, June 2002**

Remus found himself waking up on the broken reclining chair in the small living room of Aberforth's safe house in Lille. He hadn’t been to this specific house before as Aberforth had had to move around the city several times due to near misses with larger displays of magic. It was a narrow and tall little house with a Muggle convenience shop below. The outside looked derelict—mainly because it was—but he could see where visitors and residents had tried to make the space more homey. 

He managed to stand up straight on his third attempt at getting out of the chair, his bones pulsing with the moon that would be in three days’ time. Pain shot up his spine, but he found himself too tired to make a noise. 

“You can’t stay here, Lupin. I won’t have you changing here. There's no basement. You’ll have to move on,” Aberforth said from behind him. 

Remus turned round too quickly and winced. He knew this. He had been sent here by Luna two days ago, though he had disagreed that this was where he should be. He could go back to Caerphilly and then run with the neutral wolves that lived on the Brecon Beacons, which he had suggested, but Luna had been firm. Remus was to go to the Lille house and await further instruction. 

He gave a small nod to Aberforth, who snorted unhappily through his nose but said no more about it and moved from the room into the kitchen. It was just Remus here now, this safe house not being one commonly used for long stays, but the French Ministry had moved here, and so Aberforth was there to keep an eye out for any activity that would create obstacles in the Order’s movement around the continent. 

_ You better make a fucking plan, then,  _ Moony whispered to him. Remus could feel the tension within himself; the wolf was more anxious than angry, but it could be difficult for anyone else to tell without sharing the same body and brain.  _ WELL?! _

_ I’m here for a reason, they’ll get me somewhere safe.  _ Remus tried to calm the part of himself that was more naturally panicked, although he could tell he didn’t sound particularly sure. 

_ You think that little bitch isn’t just sending you off to your death? She’s not sent us here to kill the old man? Soft piece of shi _ — __

_ I will find a place for us to be,  _ Remus assured himself softly, cataloging places in his mind. There was a possibility of him making it to Barcelona in time, maybe even Sweden. 

_ Lyon,  _ Moony whispered as he tried to think.  _ Lyon,  _ the wolf demanded of him, leaving no room for debate. 

_ No, it wouldn’t be safe for her,  _ Remus replied, even as the thought of being near Hermione caused his pulse to climb higher. 

_ We would look after her. You have to look after her,  _ Moony pleaded. 

_ By not being there when you’re out, I am looking after her, _ Remus countered. 

_ I would never hurt her.  _ The voice was softer now, offended even. Remus knew that the part of himself he restrained, restricted, would never knowingly hurt Hermione, but that would be the problem. Moony might hurt her without intending to, and neither Remus nor the wolf would ever be able to forgive themselves. 

_ You can’t promise that. _

“Remus.” Luna’s soft and light voice rang through the room. Somewhere in the argument with himself, he had closed his eyes. He opened them to find a small hare glowing pale blue in the dark room and apparently sat on the coffee table. “Remus, there is a train from Paris to Lyon in thirty minutes, and it really is quite literally life or death for you to get on this train.” 

_ Lyon.  _

The hare disappeared, taking the light with it. He bolted from where he had stood up to the stairs to the room his belongings were stowed in. He never truly unpacked anywhere, but he knew he would have to be out of here straight away.

_ Move it, dickhead.  _

He threw every item not in his trunk into it and did several loops of the room. Each time, he checked the same places to ensure he hadn’t left the same things. He hastily shunk his trunk and put it in his pocket, and in his hurry, the sharp edge of a pocket mirror snapped off and flew straight into his face. 

_ Fucking idiot.  _

He didn’t even stop to wince, just lifted his wand to his face and whispered an  _ Episkey  _ before taking the stairs back to the living room three at a time. 

The Floo was blocked. Or the Floo that would usually get him to the fireplace in an abandoned warehouse a few minutes walk from the station in Paris wasn’t going to let him through. He was thrown backwards twice trying to barge his way through. He paced back and forth. He couldn’t miss this; he’d already wasted maybe ten minutes, but he couldn’t not get to her. Was she going to be found? Had something already happened to her? 

_ I will climb my way through and get to her myself, you useless fucking excuse for a wiz _ — __

A wizard. He was a  _ wizard _ . 

_ CRACK _

**Paris, June 2002**

He slammed to the ground, his ribs on fire. He had never Apparated that far before, had never even had the inclination, and he could see why he wouldn’t be doing it again. Lifting his shirt out of his trousers revealed that he had very mildly splinched himself across his ribs on his right side. A growl of frustration rose in him, escaping the tight leash he held on his emotions. 

He didn’t know what time it was or how much time had passed, and he didn’t know exactly where he was. If Hermione was in danger, he would Apparate to Lyon until he was in three pieces if he had to. Thankfully, a quick survey of his surroundings revealed the familiar location. He was behind the massive Muggle bins that sat outside pubs and bars on Monday mornings opposite the station in Paris. He had made it. 

He stuffed his hands in his pockets, finding his wallet that thankfully still had some money in it, and ran across the road, dodging taxis and people on bicycles, before flying through the glass doors of the station. 

This station’s platforms were both numbered and lettered - upstairs for letters and downstairs for numbers - but a paid of nondescript doors hid the Voyage de Magique. He felt his ribs hit the boring doors as he made his way to the right train, the word  _ Lyon _ on the side of the bright green steam train, and clambered on to it. When he found a compartment that was empty, he collapsed onto the bench on the left side and begged the world to be left alone. 

He had stopped bleeding, that he could tell, and he didn’t feel light-headed despite running at full speed for longer than maybe he ever had in his human form. He was breathing heavily, but the breath came easily. Though nearly intolerable, the pain meant he wouldn’t die on this train. 

_ She could still be dead.  _ Moony paced around inside his mind, the feeling of the animal within him under his skin almost as awful as the pain. 

_ She won’t be; she can’t be.  _ Remus refused to let this be what he thought about the whole way there. Hermione had to be okay. That was surely why he was on the train. 

_ She won’t want you, not with me stuck inside you. You’ll get there, you’ll save her, and she will reject you.  _ Moony was chasing every errant thought he could, nervous and angry. 

_ If she rejects me, at least she is alive to do so,  _ Remus replied softly, attempting to make the wolf see sense. 

_ Martyr bullshit. You want her as much as I do.  _

Remus sat there with that thought going round in his head. The thought that was true, the thought that plagued him because when he was married to Dora, though the wolf was comforted by her presence, he didn’t want her. Not the same way Remus had. Remus had fought it for so long because he didn’t think it was fair to Dora that not all of him could love her the way a human could. Remus had married Dora in a selfish act, he thought. When he had kissed her and touched her and sunk himself into her, he had done so knowing that the monster inside him had allowed him that happiness. 

Hermione was different. They both wanted her, Moony maybe even more so. Moony had certainly noticed her first, had seen her wrestle a giant, living horcrux off the neck of Severus Snape, and wanted to feast on her mouth. The wolf had watched her grow thin in her worry for her best friend and the mourning of Ronald Weasley and wanted to lick at her neck and touch the sides of her torso and ground himself in her. 

_ You could solve one of those problems. You know what waits for her in Amsterdam,  _ Moony reminded him. He never seemed to tire of reminding Remus what he was keeping from the woman he desired. 

_ I cannot tell her. Luna has made it clear that any scenario in which I reveal what I kno _ —

_ Fuck everyone else. She would be happy. We could make her happy,  _ Moony whispered. 

Remus doubted that was true. Remus thought maybe no one could make her happy. The young woman he had left behind had seemed almost bored of her own sadness the last time he was there. When he had talked with her into the night, when her scent had pulled him in, when he had left her so close to getting what he wanted. 

_ Coward.  _

That was certainly true. 

The pain in his side mellowed to a throb, and he coughed once or twice. The pain felt like what he imagined a gunshot wound felt like going through his chest. At some point, a train guard with a floating ticket punch above his shoulder came to sell him his ticket, and when Remus was left alone, he began to doze with the image of Hermione Granger’s soft, denim-clad legs resting either on top of his or next to him on the sofa in the tiny apartment she kept herself in. Once or twice, Moony’s worry sprang to the surface, but Remus knew now how to calm the wolf, and they went back to bickering lightly before silence rang in his head. 


	8. Chapter 8

**Lyon, August 2002**

Remus walked from his seat before the train stopped, and he was the first person standing behind the guard as the massive engine pulled into the Gare du Lyon. He nearly tripped down the steps that led to the Muggle entryway and found himself pushing around people to get to the doors. His gaze lingered on the platform, searching through the crowd for the first time; Portkey travel necessitated that he’d never had to walk through this city before. 

Remus saw a solitary curly head upright above the heads of the commuting crowd of the station. She was wearing a white cotton shirt and dark blue jeans. The heat must have been doing something to her hair because not only was it longer than it was at New Year’s but it had grown larger. Knowing she had caught a glimpse of him because she removed the book from in front of her face and started to walk for the exit, he followed.

When they reached an abandoned public car park, she waited for him, tapping her foot with a cold but neutral look on her face. Her disapproval of him seeped from her pores as she moved her wand from up her sleeve to her back pocket. 

He waited for her to acknowledge him; he wouldn’t be able to hide his injuries forever, but if he stayed very still and was very careful, he might not get a whiff of her scent from the warm breeze gliding through her hair. 

Moony was silent in his head but his presence was arresting. It was like being able to feel the breath of the monster within him against the inside of his skull. He was enraptured by her face, cataloging ways that she could be injured and then ticking them off when she remained obviously unharmed. The wolf pressed up against the barrier Remus kept between them, gaze pouring over her cheekbones, her eyes, her eyelashes. Both man and beast couldn’t take their eyes off her. 

\-----

“Do I have something on my face?” Hermione asked, no longer able to stand the silence, making herself walk towards him. “You certainly do,” she said, lifting her hand to gently trace the pink line under Remus’ eye. She found her wand in the tote bag she carried with her and lifted it to his face with a whispered “ _ Episkey” _ and watched the line fade. A magical injury then, she pursed her lips. 

“Hermione.” Remus grinned as he said her name. He looked warm, happy and nervous, leaning down to place a small kiss on her cheek. She could feel the small cracks on his lips as they stroked across the apple of her cheek, and a blush swept up the bottom of her neck, rolling over her face and through her scalp. “It’s so good to see you,” he said, his face still very close to hers. A repeated gesture from when he left her last time—almost kissing him. 

She whipped her head back as fast as she could without injuring herself. She couldn’t understand in what universe he felt he was allowed to show her affection after treating her like a monster he had to run from nearly eight months before. He moved quickly, too, body curling in on a wince. Blood seeped through his jumper, and she invaded his space again, examining the injury. Splinched, though not terribly. He hadn’t entirely ripped the skin, but there was a defined slash extending from his rib cage to just below his navel. 

“I have Dittany at the flat,” she said as concern clouded her anger. Looking him over, he seemed to be fine, his body language completely confident and clearly all show. His eyes were full of worry, coloured by questions. She didn’t have an answer to them, so she just gave him a small smile before taking both of his hands in hers and attempting something she hadn’t in a very long time: Apparition, directly to the lobby of 4 Rue De President Carnot. 

\-----

The Padfoot duplicate, that guarded Hermione and the apartments, was very strange to come across. He hadn’t seen Sirius in man or dog form in such a long time, often forgetting his best friend. 

Remembering was a sharp misery. 

Hermione’s voice rang out in the foyer as she warned the safety mechanism away. Even though this place had a very secure Fidelius Charm, they had learned their lesson from Mundungus Fletcher’s access to Grimmauld Place; no one was taking any chances with Hermione’s safety. 

She had done a good job of Apparating them here; though his ribs stung from the pressured blackness of the experience, it was hardly any worse than how he felt when getting off the train. She still held his hand as she pulled him into one of the flats that spread across the ground floor of the building, turning once into a kitchen and then again into a breakfast nook. 

Books lined a shelf behind the bench style seating and every kitchen surface, all of which seemed to be about several different wizarding wars that took place before 1900. She only let go of his hand when she turned to grab what looked like a Muggle first aid box out of a cupboard that probably once held pots and pans but now held more books along with the small plastic green box. 

It was only when she had let go of him that he had felt like something was missing without her touching him; the pull & rightness of touching her hadn’t been a problem since maybe three days after he had left Lyon at the beginning of the year. 

Kneeling at his feet, Hermione unbuttoned his shirt from the bottom up to see the whole of his soon to be newest scar. Measuring the length of the wound with her fingertips, she muttered under her breath. He watched the tips of her oval fingernails carefully avoid the sensitive skin, her pulse jumping in the light green veins on her hand. He watched her arm stiffen as she noticed him looking at her, their gazes catching She went to bite her lip before apparently thinking better of it and turned away to pick the vial of Dittany from the first aid box. 

“This will sting,” she said quietly, no longer looking at him at all. When he looked over her head, a painting of three women sitting by a lake was watching them. Remus never thought about the art on the walls of these flats. None of them moved or talked, as they once belonged to Muggles, but all of them seemed to watch him, judge him. The art in these apartments seemed to protect her. 

_ She doesn’t need protecting, dickhead,  _ Moony muttered, a little distracted by the witch’s proximity. 

Remus furrowed his brow at the clock on the wall; it had only been thirty minutes since he had spotted her from the train. Under their normal circumstances of being reunited, Remus would be waiting for her to reveal if she had news. But there was no need this time; they both knew she did. They both knew that he could spend days with her this time because she had informed Luna that she had  _ news.  _

_ Touch her,  _ Moony insisted, throwing himself around. 

He couldn't think of that right now, not with Hermione’s fingers on his belly. Not while he imagined what they could do with several days—what he could do to her without a time limit. 

_ You could fuck her in every one of these apartments,  _ Moony provided unhelpfully as Remus took deep breaths through his nose while trying to remain quiet. He was starting to twitch in his trousers and felt immediate guilt. 

_ Guilty about what? She wants you, too; you can smell it.  _ He could smell it, just like he could last time. A sharp cloud of arousal enveloped her when he was near. He knew as well as anyone that people were just sometimes aroused, that her isolation here and any contact with any man could cause an arousal reaction in her. But her gentle fingers could be wrapped around him, her fingernails could run deep through the skin of his shoulders or thighs. 

_ Not acceptable, _ he replied to Moony, trying to get ahold of the situation but then— 

The Dittany touched his wound, and he didn’t need to worry about his growing erection anymore. It hurt a lot, a dull ache that pulled at his insides and burned on the surface, but the wound was disappearing. 

“There,” she said, looking up and into his eyes again. “Good as new.” Time stopped when their eyes met again. 

_ Kiss her,  _ Moony growled. 

She looked nervous, but there was a flicker of the fire he had seen in her months before. He lifted his hand to her cheekbone, and it didn’t feel like months anymore. 

“You left me,” she whispered. It sliced into him quietly, but the pain of his shame roared in his ears. 

_ I just  _ knew  _ you’d fucked it up,  _ Moony growled quietly, far away, abandoning him. 

She broke the spell by removing his hand from her face and turning around to look into the open first aid kit. 

\-----

Spending an unnecessary amount of time reorganising the potions that were kept in the kitchen first aid box, Hermione carefully closed the plastic latch and put it away precisely. She took a deep breath and turned to see Remus with his head in his hands. The confidence she had felt just a moment before, ready to give him hell for what he had done at New Year’s, melted immediately. 

It was three—no, two—days away from the full moon, and he had to be in a terrible amount of pain even without splinching himself. He had, after all, acquired this injury to get to her. He was her sign that everyone wasn’t dead, and she had already started to mix up all her books. Yesterday she had concluded her Occlumency and gotten to work moving all the books about Legilimency and Occlumency around the apartments. She had only started hiding the texts she didn’t currently have upstairs ready to show whoever got here. 

Remus. It was Remus who got here. Remus who was here now and not in her head. She no longer had to rely on the poor imitation she kept in her mind; she could ask him a question without his answer being something she hadn’t already thought of. Her subconscious wouldn’t be trying to convince her to live because if Remus was alive then she had to live. 

“Everyone,” she breathed, not wanting to ask this more than once. “Everyone is okay?” 

“They’re all fine, Hermione,” he said as he lifted his head from his hands to find her eyes. His eyes were truly sea green. No gold to be seen at all, his logical brain entirely active. She knew then that not kissing him the moment she saw him, or when they arrived in the foyer or from on her knees in front of him, had been the hard but correct choice. He was here to help her, he was here to do his job. He wasn’t here  _ for  _ her, not really. “They’re all awfully worried about you though. Luna said it was life or death.” 

“Yes, I suppose it was,” Hermione said very quietly. She couldn’t talk about it right now; she wouldn’t be able to talk to Remus about the preparations she had already made for suicide. All she could do was convince him to help her. She had to find a way for him to let her enter his mind even though she had no formal training and only had read four or five books on the subject. “Would you come look at some books for me?” 

  
  


“It says in this passage that I should imagine myself entering your mind like a door. Has it been like that for you in the past? I’ve been trying to imagine a door in my mind, but it hasn’t worked.” Hermione sighed.“I’m not sure it works like that anyway. Do you think you could show me? I’ve also read in this passage”—Hermione reached over the massive book in front of her for a small published diary of a Legilimens from the nineteen-forties—“that there might be a more personal connection. Have you had someone close to you do this before or maybe entered the mind of—” 

“Hermione.” Remus put his hand on the book she held and pushed it gently so that she released it to the table. She hadn’t looked him in the eye for several minutes now, maybe not since healing him in the apartment below, and he could see her spiraling through the exhaustive research she had done on a spell that had to be performed to be perfected. “Hermione, this is not something that you will be  _ good _ at the first time, no matter how fantastically you have researched the topic. There is no use for your incredible intellect.” He couldn’t stand it anymore and lifted her chin with the tips of his fingers so that she was looking into his eyes. “You must simply try.” 

\-----

Hermione took a deep breath in through her nose as quietly as possible. She knew this would be difficult, but this man had only grazed the underside of her chin and he might as well have taken her by the throat. She couldn’t stop her lips from parting, but she closed her mouth abruptly before pushing herself upright from her sag against the table. Straightening her spine, she hoped he would see confidence and determination where she only felt the oncoming train of her failure and the tension in her bones that intensified with Remus’ presence. 

\-----

She went to kneel where she stood before him, and alarm bells rang in Remus’ head. When she looked up at him, face pulled in concentration, he couldn’t stop flashes of thoughts so clear they felt like a memory: his hands in her hair and small whimpers in her throat. 

_ Touch her.  _

“Remus?” Hermione hadn’t knelt down. Instead, she sat with her legs crossed on the worn parquet floor, and she was looking up at him, the pinch between her brows indicating her worry all he could focus on. Her brows dipped together in the middle, and a line had formed down the centre of her forehead. 

Following suit, he dropped to his knees too quickly and winced before sitting opposite her on the floor where he wound his fingers around hers and waited patiently for her to ease her nerves. 

\-----

Hermione couldn’t look away from where he had taken her hand. He hadn’t ever done that before outside of Apparating, and even then it felt more like putting on a seat belt in her mother’s car than physical affection. He was running his thumb over her knuckles, and his eyes watched her face with an open invitation for anything she might say or do. 

She could kiss him now. It’s what she had wanted, wasn’t it? She could lean across and pull his face to her and smooth her lips along his. It’s what she had pictured when she had stood on the banister only hours ago; it’s what she mourned for thinking that all her friends were dead. That the months of no communication were a sign that she was alone in the world and that she would need to carry out her years-long ritual. 

Experimentally, she leaned forward. Not enough for her intentions to be clear but enough to see if he would bolt. For a sign that he definitely didn’t want her, that his affection for her during his visit had been driven by loneliness and isolation as she feared. He didn’t move a muscle. But he just sat there, pliant and calm, as she shuffled her legs a little in a show of making herself comfortable to make her lean look more natural. 

Slipping her wand out of her back pocket, she held it firmly in her hand. It felt like a weapon now. She assumed that all her friends viewed their wands as a means to attack and defend, a tool to hurt or avoid being hurt in return. There was probably no one she knew that didn’t look down at their wand the way a Muggle would look down at a gun in a war film. She had been so removed from that mindset here but finally, she understood, could see what damage she could do with the vinewood and heartstring—the damage she could do to someone that would destroy her to do so. 

\-----

Remus watched Hermione lift her wand up in front of her face, and her features smoothed to almost nothing. Anxiety was coming off her in waves, but she was ignoring it to, what? Sooth him? He clicked his neck joint that was becoming stiff from sitting on the floor, but he wouldn’t move her now that she had decided, now that her resolve was hardening before his eyes. He knew she could do it, that she’d pick up faster than anyone he’d ever met because that was what she’d been doing since she was thirteen years old. 

_ She’s not thirteen anymore.  _

“Legimens,” she whispered and fire tore through his brain. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We're getting there pals! I'm so excited for the next few chapters & for the story to really get down to business.


	9. Chapter 9

_ Hermione was in the Gryffindor common room— _ and then she wasn’t. 

“Fuck, ow, fuck.” Remus was still cross-legged, but he’d fallen on his back. The bottom of his palms were digging into his eye sockets, and he was the palest she’d ever seen him.

She wasn’t good enough; she would never be good enough. 

Reason left her as she sprang from her position and over his body. She knelt with her knees at his left hip and her hands on either side of his head. He wasn’t frowning; if anything, his eyebrows had shot to the middle of his forehead. There was sweat on his top lip and his teeth had taken most of his bottom lip into his mouth. A low whining sound that quickly issuing from his throat came to a stop when he moved his arms to the side and elbowed her right in the corner of her left cheekbone. 

\-----

He felt the contact, then the immediate loss of her body heat. Blinking rapidly to regain his vision from the white-hot pain, he could see where she sat on her haunches cupping her face. He had hurt her. 

_ You fucking idiot. I am going to kill us in your sleep.  _

He ignored Moony as he fell forward to remove her hand and replace it with his own. 

“It was just a shock,” she muttered as they made eye contact. He was too close to her; he had just hit her in the face and now he was too close to her. He would scare her, and she would run. “It didn’t hurt. I just—I’m fine. I hurt you,” she breathed out very quickly and regained her composure. She hadn’t physically taken his hand away from her, but she leaned backward to sit cross-legged again, and he made a concerted effort not to follow her slightly red cheekbone with his hand. 

“The pain is gone now,” he said, trying to make it very clear that he had absolutely no problem with her causing him pain. 

_ I bet you’d thank her if she slapped you,  _ Moony sneered. 

He followed her movements so that they were sat across from one another again. This time he made it so they were almost knee-to-knee, and he took both of her hands. “I’m ready to go again when you are.”

\-----

Hermione’s mind whizzed. She had to concentrate; distract herself from the pain that she would no doubt be causing him, but she could feel how tired she already was from such a small glimpse inside his mind. How was she meant to be able to do this when less than two seconds had winded her? 

She looked down at where both of her hands were clasped in his and tried to picture the door in the centre of his forehead as it had said in the text. Maybe she couldn’t just think of a door in the sense of an opening r but a physical entrance to the inside of him. At the very last minute, she stopped herself from looking him in the eyes, as she had to focus and her peripheral vision could already see the gold flickering on and off like a lamp light behind his gaze. If she looked directly into them, they may never be able to do this, and she would never save Harry. 

Harry. 

Harry Potter. 

She couldn’t stop, she couldn’t let herself fall into Remus’ body and move her hands up the plains of his broad back. Harry couldn’t wait; Harry was dying and she was not going to let that happen. He was Harry Potter and the Chosen One, but she was Hermione Granger, and she saved his life. She was made to save him, and he was made to save the world. She would do this. 

“ _ Legilimens _ .”

_ It was definitely the Gryffindor common room. She could feel the carpet beneath her socks, the warmth of the fireplace to her right. It was maybe too warm.  _

_ Werewolves run hotter than those unaffected by lycanthropy. The textbook she had memorised repeated in her mind. Looking across the room, she spotted Remus Lupin in the large red wing back chair that stood with another in deep blue to the right of the stairs that lead to the boy’s dormitories. He appeared as he had when he sat across from her in the apartments in dark grey wool trousers and an old brown, round-necked jumper. His scars were in every place they were on the physical man, and his hair fell over his forehead in the same way, but this Remus Lupin had gold eyes. This Remus Lupin had better posture, though it was weighed down by an unnatural hold on the arms on the chair he sat in as if he were chained there.  _

_ This was Moony.  _

_ “I have been waiting for a chance alone with you,” he said with his teeth more on display than when Remus spoke. His natural smile was coiled with a tension that pulled at the creases next to his eyes. He was sitting back against the chair with his shoulders relaxed and his torso at ease, and his body language was more carefree than she had ever seen in person, but he was a predator. He was fierce and intent solely on her. “You should come and sit down.”  _

_ “I’m alright over here, thank you very much.” Hermione couldn’t let herself near him; she had never spoken directly with a werewolf before. She was distracted by the thought that maybe no one had ever had a conversation with the wolf inside the man, inside  _ any _ man before. Floored by the possibilities, she was grateful for the diversion from the pull that led to the feet of Moony.  _

_ “Oh, but you really would like to be closer to me,” he said, and she knew it was true. It felt like her skin wasn’t her own, like she would be unable to concentrate unless she was touching him.  _

_ “Am I causing him pain?” She didn’t know how to work a filter with Legilimency. Everything she thought about him she spoke allowed. This alarmed her, what if that meant that she would tell him how much she wanted him? She longed to be closer to this brutal version in front of her, she needed to keep calm and quiet so she wouldn’t reveal all to the man who sat opposite her. _

_ “We will be fine.” His posture bristled slightly at the mention of Remus directly, and then he was on his feet. Hermione was only just able to keep herself still when her first instinct was to run into his arms. She found herself unable to move backward and so resolved to say still in the middle of the large domed room.  _

_ He was less than a foot from her when he stopped and firmly gripped her elbow. His touch wasn’t frightening as she supposed it might be coming from someone she had never really met before. “He wants to please you; he wants you to be happy with him.” Moony didn’t sound very fond of this observation. His resentment of the man who was holding her hand was resounding and final.  _

_ “What do you want?” she whispered, looking into the molten gold of his glowing irises.. This face had almost no lines on its forehead. The scars were still there, every single one of them a perfect copy of the real thing but this face had been unburdened by time.  _

_ This face… this face was descending towards hers, her heart racing in her chest, and then he was kissing her, he was consuming her.  _

_ It didn’t feel like a real kiss. She couldn’t feel his lips on her real lips and his hands bracketing her rib cage and throat weren’t warm on her skin, but she felt like she was on fire nonetheless. The heat came from her sternum first, like it would force its way out of her chest, and then descended until it was sat firmly against the front walls of her sex. It didn’t feel like touch; it felt like it did when she had thought about Remus in the middle of the night. How she felt in her dreams of him. Both of his hands were on her throat now, tilting her head back so he could run his open mouth along her jaw. He bit down on her ear lobe, and the throb in her grew two sizes.  _

_ He was gone as quickly as he had consumed her, sitting in the chair again with his hands glued to the arms. He wasn’t smiling anymore. She felt breathless, but this time, instead of feeling tired from the work her brain was doing, she felt a sizzle of life under every inch of her skin.  _

_ “He wants you to find him,” Moony growled from where he was imprisoned in the chair. “He won’t let me—if you find him... I can—FUCK.” A guttural roar rose from his throat, and he heaved his chest as his pupils eclipsed the gold in his eyes. “He thinks I’ll scare you off, that I’m too much, but I’m just enough for you, aren’t I love? You want me. You can feel the want in your bones and in your cunt. You want me, and you love him, and we can have you, can’t we?”  _

_ Hermione couldn’t concentrate. She had to find him? Moony was being held back, the way she had watched happen from the outside of his mind a thousand times. He was right that she wanted him, but he was wrong that she only loved Remus. She wanted the kind and true-hearted man with as much fire as she wanted the overwhelming and glorious version of him in front of her. They wanted her;  _ he _ wanted her.  _

_ “Where is he?” she whispered, smoothing her hair in an effort to hide that she touched her lips. Moony pushed himself to sit upright, but he still kept his shoulders pressed against the back of the chair. His face looked pained and angry as he fought to pull his hands and forearms from the fabric. Hermione marvelled at Remus’ mental strength; keeping this version of him restrained must be exhausting. Believing that he had to keep these carnal elements of his personality inside was so sad. He wasn’t protecting her from some dangerous monster but from just another part of himself. This wasn’t a  _ wolf  _ in front of her but a darker sort of man.  _

_ “I’m not allowed to tell you where he is. You have to find him,” Moony ground between his teeth. He stopped struggling, but it was obvious that he was livid. His eyes flashed brighter for a second, with mischief. A Marauder.  _

_ “I don’t know how to do that. I’ve never done this before,” she said, desperately clinging to the idea that it wasn’t a completely pathetic thing to say.  _

_ “You are, as always, doing gorgeously.” He smiled in a way that both warmed and warned her. Hermione knew in theory that this carefree, angry man only seemed dangerous because Remus believed that he was dangerous. He wasn’t real; he could only say things that Remus truly believed and Remus believed above anything that this part of himself was a danger to the people he cared for. “You have to really want to find him. Is there something you need to know that he knows?”  _

_ Hermione didn’t know why, but it felt like a trick question, like there was a correct answer to his question and Hermione simply could not think of it. She always knew the right answer—when people explained things, she could fill blanks and guess answers most of the time—but when she made eye contact with Moony, she didn’t have the answer he wanted from her. She shook her head and filled with shame; she had failed the first thing she needed. She wasn’t good enough.  _

_ He was up against her in an instant. He held her shoulders with both hands before his right travelled to her jawline to force her to look at him. His face held all the care and concern she had ever seen in Remus’ eyes only with more intensity, more fire. He looked like he was going to punch someone.  _

_ “Hey, no,” he whispered and kissed her forehead so gently she found it difficult to place where he’d stored all the tense anger that rolled over him. “You just need to want something from him. You need to have a goal in mind, something to find.”  _

_ She took a deep breath and closed her eyes. What was something she would want to know? Remus wasn’t cruel enough to know how to save Harry without telling her. It couldn’t be THE thing she wanted to know, and then it struck her that she might be very stupid.  _

_ “Moony,” she said, addressing him directly and watching his Adam's apple bob in reply. “Does Remus know something that I would want to know?” she asked, and he grinned at her. She had pleased him, and she liked that. His happiness made her happy.  _

_ “You wonderful witch,” he breathed out and gathered her in a hug that felt a lot like a trap. She would have to teach this part of Remus to be gentle. “Yes, yes he does.” _

THWUMP.

_ His body flew back and hit the upholstery of the wingback chair. Hermione couldn’t help but think that the internal fight between Remus and Moony must be exhausting for the mind that held them both.  _

_ “RON WEASLEY IS ALIVE. REMUS KNOWS WHERE HE IS,” Moony screamed before his lips sealed so tightly it looked painful and he continued to struggle, but Hermione took no notice. It took every ounce of strength and concentration to stay where she was and not return to the apartments. Ron was alive.  _

_ Ron was ALIVE.  _

_ She could feel what Moony meant. That wanting something from Remus felt like fuel, something that pushed past where Moony sat struggling against invisible bonds and up the stairs to the boy’s dormitories.  _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Aaaaaahhhhhh. Full disclosure, this chapter is the first thing I ever wrote of this fic. It was eight months ago and I'd never written fanfiction before and I wrote this and thought I might have something. It means so much so to me and I am so proud of it. It is my baby. Posting it has been exciting and terrifying. 
> 
> Mostly, I'd like to thank everyone who is reading this story because you're all so supportive and great. This tiny corner of the internet has really embraced how much I push the Remus Agenda and it's just wonderful.


	10. Chapter 10

__

_She climbed the stairs that she had never been able to before, those which led to the boy’s dormitories in Gryffindor Tower. Each floor had a dormitory on either side, but it was only when she had climbed seven flights of stairs and reached the landing at the very top of the tower, a rare part of the castle that she had never seen, did she feel the pull to her left._

_The door was closed, and she could see_ Sirius Black _scratched into the lacquer of the wood.A pang of hurt lanced through her for the werewolf that kept reminders of his dead friend even in the safest part of his mind. That hurt also reminded her that Remus held information about her best friend, about the boy she held a memory of, sodden to his skin and holding the Sword of Gryffindor, in her mind. That somehow, Remus knew where Ron was. Ron, who everyone thought was dead; Ron who she had mourned and said goodbye to and wept for, was alive, and Remus had known where he was all along. She burned with rage._

_She slammed herself through the door to the Seventh Year Gryffindor Dormitory to see a Remus, countenance heavy with sorrow, almost exactly as his physical being perched on the floor opposite her. He sat on the second of the four beds that curved with the turret of the castle walls towards a bathroom furthest away from her. He didn’t even look at her. He must know that she was there. She knew how capable a wizard he was; he could have kept her from opening the door if he wanted._

_She moved to sit on the first bed that faced his, but he looked up at her with a grimace._

_“You won’t want to sit on that one.”_

_“Oh won’t I?!” she asked, louder than she intended and sounded more hurt than she wanted to._

_“No. Wormtail,” he said pointing to the bed she was about to sit on and carried on pointing at the beds in order. “Moony, Padfoot, and Prongs.”_

_“Proudly present to you the Marauder’s Map,” she whispered quietly, finishing the words on the map that she knew better than she knew most actual maps._

_She realised what he meant: she was about to sit on Peter Pettigrew’s bed. The traitor. She quickly walked around the bed that Remus sat on to sit on Sirius Black’s bed. It was unmade, and when she looked up to the canopy, it was plastered with magazine pages. Muggle magazine pages of women, men, and motorbikes. She smiled before turning to where Remus now faced her but refused to meet her gaze._

_“Where is Ron?” Hermione croaked, her voice crackling on her friend’s name._

_“Amsterdam,” Remus said, so quietly that Hermione thought she might not have heard him. Everything he said seemed to trigger a landmine of rage in her mind._

_“For what reason would you think that letting me believe he was dead would be the right decision?” she asked, levelling her voice at the most reasonable volume she could. She could feel her sadness approaching, the grief that she felt with every thought of Ron._

_“You didn’t believe he was dead,” Remus said, finally making eye contact with her. His eyes were the deepest green she had ever seen them; in some lights, they could have been blue. “You have never believed he was dead.”_

_“That’s not an answer to my question Remus. WHY—why would you_ tell _me he was dead?” Hermione could feel the tears that ran down her cheeks, but her face was dry here. Her voice betrayed her, cracking and quivering, but her face stayed stoic in Remus’ mind even as it crumpled in the apartments._

_“Mostly I was told that you couldn’t know Ron was alive. I was told that you would refuse to come here. I was told every possible version of our future meant you dying if Ron was found.” Remus looked down at his hands as they squeezed each other tightly. Relief at telling her was obvious in every crease in his face._

_“What else?” Hermione asked, trying to lean forward and show compassion._

_“What do you mean, what else?” Remus pinched the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger, and she wondered for a second if this was still hurting him. Maybe her being angry or her sadness hurt him. Good. He deserved to hurt._

_“You said_ mostly _. What other reason would you have for keeping this from me?” she asked, trying to remain very calm and watching the pain dissipate from his features. Her hypothesis must have been correct. If she felt angry while doing this, he felt pain._

_“If you knew that Ron was alive,” he said through gritted teeth that reminded Hermione of the man that sat shackled to a wingback chair below them, “you wouldn’t want me.”_

_Another landmine went off in Hermione’s brain, but this time she didn’t know how to feel. Why_ wouldn’t _she want him? Why would he want her to want him? Why on_ earth _would she want Ron? A boy that she had kissed once ninety minutes before he had disappeared from her life. That boy was still eighteen in her mind, and she was twenty-two._

_“You want me to want you?” she asked, trying to not let go of the anger she had felt but finding it muffled by confusion and the start of something warm in her belly._

_He barked a laugh that she hadn’t heard before. He usually sniggered, almost silently. His shoulder would shake and sometimes his breath would become slightly heavier, but he’d never guffawed like this._

_“You are the least observant genius I have ever met.” He looked up at her, and it was only the soft puff of his laughter fanning across her cheeks that made her realise that they’d inched towards each other. They had both moved to the edges of the beds they sat on and leant forward, and if she pushed even a little further, she would land in his lap. “I have wanted you for years.”_

_“That’s impossible,” Hermione whispered and watched his face twitch as it responded to her closeness. “You already have me.”_

_He moved forward very slowly, but it took a second for his lips to softly pillow the corner of her mouth._

_Hermione thrusted her fingers into his hair, fisting them in his flaxen locks. She could still feel him holding back. Maybe it was because this wasn’t real, the same way that she could feel that kissing Moony wasn’t real. His lips on hers were sweet and soft, and the tingle that went from her sternum to her navel felt soothing and familiar, though it didn’t feel entirely him._

_It took maybe the most concentration she’d ever needed, but with her real hand she lifted her fingers in Remus’ hold and dug the tips of her fingernails into his hand. His very real growl surrounded her and pulled at the edges of her concentration until -_ she was back in the apartments. Her eyes were still closed and all she could see was darkness. 

All she could feel was the cold floor beneath her and Remus’ hands in hers and Remus’ hands moving up her arms and over her shoulders and into her hair. 

She opened her eyes, and he was there. They both were. His facial expression was all Remus, but the eyes… his eyes were Moony. Gold with a grassy green in the centre and so heavily fixed on her that she could feel their weight. 

“Remus,” she breathed, and he was so close to her face that she watched his eyelashes flutter. “Rem—”

His lips were on hers, and it was better than any kiss on the cheek or stolen touch of his hand or kissing an imaginary version of him in the Gryffindor Common Room. 

It was bliss. 

His lips were smooth across hers, bruising in their intensity. They pushed so hard that her teeth ached, and she pushed back so hard that he fell back again, but this time she climbed him. Never releasing his lips from hers, she put a knee on either side of his hips. 

She let the weight of her body settle over him and felt him harden beneath her. He growled into her mouth, and then she was pulling his hair for real. She couldn’t breathe, and the only way it seemed she would be able to remain conscious was to hold his head still against the floor with her hands and remove herself from his face. 

She whimpered as she pulled away, mourning the loss of his hot mouth against her face, but as she heaved her breath across his cheekbones, she had time to look at him. A low, keening noise that could have been either a growl or a purr issued from deep in his throat. Every time he tried to release himself from her grip in his hair he winced but groaned, and she felt him pulse against the centre hem in the crotch of her jeans. 

“Are you in any pain?” she asked as she remembered his suffering at her hand what felt like days before now. She made eye contact with him, and although there was more green than gold now the intensity had not mellowed. It occurred to her that this might be the most truly Remus she had ever seen the man beneath her. 

“Y-yes,” he said, and it was low with a promise in it. “This _—_ ” He thrust his hips up from underneath her, pressing his erection into her core. “This is incredibly painful.” 

She felt her blush spread over every inch of her skin. 

“You _—_ you know what _—_ ah _—_ I mean.” With his head trapped in her fists but his hands free to roam, as she spoke he let go of her hair and slid one hand to the side of her face and his other gripped the swell of her arse. 

“The moon is nights away, and I’ve just realised that the woman that I’ve wanted for nearly two years wants me back. You’ll have to excuse my tolerance for a little headache.” His pupils flashed gold very briefly before settling back to almost green. 

“You don’t have to keep yourself tethered, you know,” she said and tried to make it clear how little she wanted him to hold back. She could handle him; he wanted her. 

He grinned, and the small creases at the side of his eyes were back. This wasn’t inside his head, and this wasn’t some part of him he felt he needed to keep on a lead. This was _him_. “You can’t just have one of us you know, witch. You’ll have to put up with both.” 

“There aren’t two of you, Remus. You may feel like you’ve successfully captured that part of you, but it’s all you. You can give it another name and claim that it’s too dangerous for me, but it's _all you_ . I meant what I said. I want _you_.” She smiled, biting her bottom lip and waiting as his eyes searched her for some deception. His nose twitched, and she felt his breath lift her up and down with his lungs. 

Remus pushed her back, and suddenly they had switched places. He was demonstrably far stronger than she was, and it appeared as though she _hadn’t_ had him stuck with her fists in his hair. Her legs fell apart in a way that felt indecent, but she didn’t care to correct them before he dropped his body between them and let his nose run from just under her breasts to the crook of her neck. 

“If you don’t take me up to that tiny flat this second, I plan on the first time I fuck you to be into this floor. Don’t you think you deserve better than that?” He let his teeth settle over her clavicle without biting down, and she felt him take a deep breath from her skin before she scrambled out from beneath him with a loud laugh. “I could try and be gentle, but you’ve let him loose now, and I’m not sure how kind I could be to your beautiful body, but I bet I could make it worth it.” 

“ _Knox_!” She shouted while dragging her wand from her back pocket, creating a darkness that might have given her a few seconds to run from his tempting threat. She didn’t want to run and fall over, but she also didn’t want to give Remus an opportunity to make good on his promise. The look in his eyes as he crawled towards her and up onto his feet made it perfectly clear that he would drag her back to the floor and do... well, exactly what she wanted him to do, but she definitely wanted it somewhere softer. 

She knocked a few books out her way of the door with her elbow, and he pushed up against her back.

“How did these books even get on the floor? I’ll need to reorg _—_ ”

“Do you want me to talk you through the accidental magic I displayed while you were inside my head or do you want to come upstairs with me and let me eat your cunt?” 

“No, I want _—_ I want the second thing.” 

“Good.” Remus smiled, a little like the Moony she had spoken to just minutes before and took her hand before dragging her across the hallway to the tall, narrow staircase to her flat. 

Hermione didn’t really have an expectation of what would happen next. When she had imagined him before, it had been the concept of him. She hadn’t pictured his body clearly or what she wanted to do to it. Just the feel of him. It was lucky then that Remus couldn’t make it to her bedroom before pushing her down onto the sofa at their side as soon as they were through the entrance to the flat. 

She was suddenly surrounded by the plush of the cushions and a hot and hard body on top of her. 

“This arse,” he grumbled into her mouth as he reached behind her to pull her jeans down to her thighs, taking her underwear with them. She gasped against his face as his blunt nails scratched the flesh of her bum and around the flesh so they sat surprisingly softly at the crease where her leg joined her body. 

\-----

Remus felt her tremble a little below him and took an opportunity to let her breath. 

_Taste her,_ Moony demanded. The voice of the wolf inside him had only been making soft keening noises before now. Hermione so perfectly encapsulated what all of him wanted and suddenly he felt himself almost rid of a separate voice within him. 

She whimpered a little, and he looked down at her. Her eyes pleaded with him as his fingers brushed the curls below her abdomen. He moved down, and when he had an angle to grip her jeans and underwear again, he pulled them all the way off her legs by leaning backwards against the arm of the sofa. He flung them to the side and pushed her by the hips so she half sat upright against the other end. When she had righted herself and was pushing the swell of her arse into his hands, he crawled at a slower pace. 

Her breathing was heavy as he settled on his elbows and tried to steady his racing thoughts, but it was a lost battle with the flesh of her thighs gripped in her hands. He could feel the muscle of them coiled beneath a soft layer of grabbable flesh. He could imagine the strength she had, how she could bounce on him or how she could rupture his ear drums with them wrapped around his face. 

_You need to go faster; she'll run away._ Moony’s anxiety bounced around him until he looked up from beneath his lashes.

She was smiling. Her smile broke through every delicious detail he could come up with, every thought he had had alone in safe houses across Europe and every argument he had ever had with himself over whether she could ever want him. She did. She must be mad, but he knew that look on anyone. Her eyelids were heavy as she took deep breaths and placed her hand on his cheek. There was a moment when he thought that she deserved better, deserved a bed, but she fisted his hair and grinned wider, hungrier than before. 

He pulled against her hold and bit the inside of her thigh. Her moan and the wrench of his hair follicles tightened everything inside of him. It was lightning that began in his scalp and hit the base of his cock. He was the hardest he could ever remember being. Her skin was so unbelievably soft compared to the nails that let go of him and scratched into the side of his neck. 

\-----

Remus’ moan vibrated against the skin of her inner thigh, and she thought that maybe he hadn’t gotten the hint before he dived for her cunt. His tongue pushed flat against her opening and, like a tidal wave, pushed up and over her public bone to lie flat against her clitoris. His lips closed around her as her whole world focused in on the way he pushed his face fast from side to side against her. The string that was beginning to pull when he had thrown her to the ground downstairs suddenly yanked upward as she tensed and relaxed over and over. His bottom lip was slightly dry but it scuffed over her bundle of nerves just enough to give her the warning signs of oblivion. 

The tension in her was starting to feel painful, and the soft scuff of his stubble was stimulating the sensitive flesh, but his tongue and lips hadn’t detached from the apex and showed no signs of doing so. 

“Rem—Remus.” She didn’t know if she could have stopped herself from saying his name, but he very suddenly applied pressure to the hood of her clit with his teeth before sucking it into his mouth and sliding two fingers into her dripping heat. She could only see white. Every ounce of tension left her body so that the only weight she felt was the one pulling deeper and deeper as she exploded at his touch. Her walls twitched around his fingers to the beat of her heart that thumped audibly from outside her chest. She let her body weight sag against the arm of the sofa as Remus kissed various soft and pink parts of her. 

“Again,” he growled before diving back between her thighs.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> OH MY GOD FINALLY RIGHT?!
> 
> I'm going back to work after 9 weeks of lockdown so all of my concentration is back on Year of Visitors. Please keep yourselves safe, you're all dreamboats for reading. 
> 
> The biggest dreamboat amongst you is Ravenslight who continues to be the cutest human being known to man and is unendingly patient with my errors.


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is NSFW.

**Lyon**

“Bed.” Hermione ground between her teeth as Remus continued to flex the broad surface of his tongue just under her clitoris. There was a burning sensation building, and she could tell that he intended to push her through it with no rest period. “We need a bed.”

She scrambled from underneath him and shuffled off her jeans over her socks, pulling her t-shirt over her head before she remembered that she wasn’t wearing a bra. 

“Stop.” 

The word was confusing in the context of the moment, and that was enough to shock her into actually stopping. Her internal muscles clenched at the sound of his voice. 

“Come here,” he growled. 

She turned around to find him standing in the dead centre of the room. He was vibrating with tension, not unlike when he had been in pain less than an hour before, but his eyes were molten. Moony’s stare held her in place for just a second before his words lured her closer to him. 

He held out his hand to her, and she gave him hers without hesitation. Lifting it to his mouth, he placed small kisses to the tips of her fingers, smearing some of her juices from his face over the top of her middle and index fingers. Being this close to him made her feel dizzy; the faint perspiration on his skin filled her head, and her skin became hyper aware of his body heat through his clothes. 

His clothes. She was naked. 

She rose on her tiptoes, her hand sliding around his neck and into his hair to tug his mouth down to hers. His groan was muffled by their kiss, the hungry sound going bone deep inside her and electrifying her every nerve ending. 

Her thighs stuck together with the wetness smeared between them. Her body keened for his touch, to be filled by him. 

“I have fantasised about this every day for the past two years,” he whispered, the ragged edge of need apparent in his voice. 

She almost sobbed in relief at those words. It wasn’t just her, then. There had been something palpable between them, growing slowly while she was left alone in the apartments and he fought and hid and protected others. She hadn’t been crazy—she hadn’t been a port in a storm. He wanted  _ her _ . 

Remus held her tight, his arm locked behind her back, holding her on her feet as he dragged the sharp edge of his teeth over the shell of her ear and down her throat. She leaned heavily against him, although the textures of his clothes were itchy and wrong to her oversensitive skin. She squeezed her legs together, her toes curling against the wooden floor at her feet. 

\------

Remus knelt at his feet in front of her. Merlin, she was glorious. Her hair was wilder than he’d seen it in a long time as it fell around her breasts, their peaks just visible under the jungle of her curls. Her hips curved and squeezed under his hands as he gripped her in order to ground himself. He had been so close—too close—to coming to his end right there on the sofa, so he would have to wear her out a little before he truly embarrassed himself by coming the second he was inside this incredible witch. 

Pulling her leg over one of his shoulders, he watched as her eyes widened before they were hidden by her fluttering lashes. He closed his mouth over a spot at the top of her thigh and sucked. She buckled slightly but managed to find a purchase in his hair, the tight pull of her fingernails against his scalp connected directly to his cock, and he groaned before sinking his teeth into the flesh at his lips. 

Hermione’s panting became breathy, and he grinned before molding his tongue under the curve of her clit and sucking for all he was worth. She was close; he could feel it. Her stomach muscles tensed at his forehead, and her hands repeatedly spasmed in his hair.

It had taken all of ten seconds, but she was there. She folded her torso over, her hands sinking into the muscles at his back. 

“You,” she gasped and panted before attempting to stand up straight, “Are extremely good at that.”

“Yes, it appears so.” 

\-------

He grinned at her, boyish and self-congratulatory, and released her, leaving her to stand, helpless and shaking, as he stripped in front of her. 

Hermione tried to use this moment to compose herself. She could feel her pulse in every part of her body, and she needed to calm down, to take hold of her senses, but he was topless.  _ Topless _ , and he had  _ abs. _ Remus Lupin, the only man who could keep up with her intellect and the kindest person she had ever come across was also, seemingly, incredibly fit. Calming down was no longer an option. 

“Go into the bedroom,” he demanded as he lowered his trousers to the floor. She turned slowly, her ankles still weak from two orgasms, but Remus walked up behind her, the hairs on his thighs brushing up against the back of her bare legs. He firmly guided her by the shoulders moving her forcefully into her cramped bedroom space. 

This room was a mess. It had before never mattered that it was a mess, that she didn’t ever make the bed or that her wash basket was overflowing, but now she felt nervous that he would see her disrespect for her living space and leave. 

It was illogical. This was a man who had never, in the time she had known him, tucked his shirt in all the way round his trousers. She had never seen him in a belt. He was not a naturally tidy person, but her irrational, sex-hungry brain couldn’t cope with the idea of him leaving. 

He didn’t seem awfully worried at the mess though. He crushed her to him, and the feeling of his skin against hers made it impossible for her to stand on her own. He kissed her hard, his hand tangling in her hair, and when they were both breathless, he lifted his head, his eyes solid and surely deep sea green. 

“Please,” she begged him, trying to drag him down to the thick mattress on the floor. She needed him, needed him so deep in her that it hurt. She wanted him to be hard with her, to wear her out. She hadn’t felt worn out in so long. They’d waited long enough. 

Finally, he covered her body, and she pulled him down with her, tugging him so that he lay on top of her. Somehow, he angled her body so that she was spread for him, rightside up on the bed instead of the pile of limbs that she had created in her urgency. 

For the first time since she’d kissed him on the floor of the apartment downstairs, her resolve wavered somewhat. She hadn’t properly looked at him, and she wasn’t sure if it was the shadows of the oncoming evening through her small bedroom window, but Remus seemed to be big. Definitely the most well-endowed man she had ever been with. It was intimidating. 

He looked down and then back to her face, his cocksured expression wavering. “I would understand if you didn’t—”

“No, no. I still want to.” She felt awful—he must have gotten that reaction before—but she trusted him to be gentle, and then when she no longer wanted him to be gentle, she trusted him not to be. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”

He blushed and breathed relief into the expanse of skin above her breasts. “I was worried you might have changed your mind.” 

“Never.” She felt then was probably time for that Gryffindor bravery, so, with a bolstering breath, she cupped her swollen, slick sex in her hand and plunged two fingers into her body. His lips parted as he watched her, and she saw his intake of breath in the rise of his chest. He could smell her. 

“Please,” she moaned, moving her fingers slowly out and then pushing back in. “Please.” 

He whispered a wandless contraceptive charm, the warmth of it settling over her belly, then he was on her. He covered her, pinning her to the mattress, as the wide tip of his cock pushed against her, stealing her breath.

\------

Remus’s cock slipped in faster than he'd expected. The slick wetness he had already ensured in her on the sofa and in the middle of her kitchen eased his way. She was molten. Her flesh was warm and soft, but her insides were scorching and wet, and her body opened to him, her flesh engorged from the pleasure she had already had. 

He willed himself not to move, staying strong above her, even as she twitched beneath him.. 

She pushed the palms of her hands over his shoulders and up into his hair, and her  _ hands— _ Merlin, her hands in his hair would be the end of him. He would spill into her far faster than he wanted, so he took both of her hands in one of his and held them above her head. 

She arched below him and moaned, setting fireworks off in his mind. 

Moony was with him, and together they worked to have her. To claim her. Biting down on his lip to contain a feral growl, he pushed slowly into her, her grip making him choke into the crook of her neck. 

“You’re so tight,” he gritted through his teeth and tried to look into her eyes in the fading light. “Am I hurting you?” 

“No,” she whimpered and pulled one knee out from under him, allowing him to slip gloriously deeper into her heat. “It’s just… been a long time.” 

He groaned and pulled back, almost entirely out, before slowly pushing back in incrementally deeper this time. 

All of his earlier feelings of hesitancy disappeared. He was no longer shocked that this was happening after such a long time. Completely lost in the moment, he was desperate to commit every sensation to memory. He knew he would never accurately remember, no matter how hard he wished, but he may never get a chance to do this again. 

\----

He withdrew, and Hermione clung to him with her cunt and her legs, trying to bring him back. She matched his every move, rolling her hips and taking more of him with every thrust. 

Everything ceased to matter. Their age difference, what would happen tomorrow, what would happen at the full moon... none of that was of consequence, and for several blissful, sweaty minutes, they were just two people caught up in the heat of one another. Her fingers dug into his back, her knees hugging his waist as he pumped into her. 

He released one of her hands from his grip and growled, “Touch yourself,” into the skin of her throat. 

Complying quickly, she snaked her hand down her body and whined when her fingers encountered the way he stretched her. She rubbed her clit furiously with her fingertips, arching and gasping as she raced towards her third orgasm. Her already sore muscles protested as her body tensed once more, and she muttered nonsensical pleas against his hair as he sped his thrusts. When she came, all she saw was white light behind her eyelids. 

Remus wasn’t far behind her, shoving hard, almost too hard, and her eager cunt still spasmed around him as he groaned and stilled. The deep pulse of his cock sent shivers of delayed pleasure through her, and she whimpered, clinging to him. 

“Are you alright?” he asked breathlessly, the persistent throbbing of his cock still letting off little fireworks of her. 

“Mhm,” she managed, beyond coherent speech. 

\-----

Remus eased out and rose from the bed to step into the small en-suite bathroom. He came back with a warm damp cloth and knelt next to her on the bed. 

He couldn’t get over her beauty. She was laid out, one arm still above her head as if he was holding it there, and her legs bent inwards like a broken marionette. Pink blush bloomed up her chest, over her neck, and to her cheeks where she held a languid smile on her face. 

He couldn’t help the intense hunger for her that still lived inside him. He felt his spent cock twitch, confirming the huge amount of trouble he’d landed himself in. 

He pulled the leg closest to him and wiped the cloth over the tops of her thighs and the puffy flesh of her cunt. She whined a little above where he cleaned her, but all he could do was quietly shush her as he watched, enraptured, as his come flowed from her. Moony made a small sound of distaste in his mind for Remus cleaning her of his seed, objecting to the removal of evidence that they had claimed their witch. She was theirs, and he was wiping the claim from her. 

“Don’t take it all,” she whispered. The raw hunger in her voice obliterated the soft, warm feelings he was sitting in. He was in  _ so much  _ trouble. 

With a deep breath, he stopped cleaning her and stood to give himself the same treatment. As soon as he was clean, he retreated to the kitchen and found them each a glass of water that he wandlessly charmed cool, a small measure of distance between them to calm the intensely possessive instincts roaring in him. 

\-----

When Remus came back into the room and handed her a glass of water, Hermione felt almost immediately overwhelmed by conflicting emotion. 

A sudden rush of relief, affection, and open hostility for the man perched naked on her mattress assaulted her. He had fulfilled the fantasy that kept her awake in that bed—he had worshipped her body—but Ron’s face swam through her mind, and her body itched with the rage climbing beneath her skin. 

He looked at her sideways, meeting her gaze very briefly before his eyes shut and he let out a long slow breath from his nose. 

Against her better judgement, her ire towards him softened. He looked extremely tired—the moon would be in less than forty-eight hours; he should be resting and eating. Hermione added guilt to the emotions that tumbled within her. 

“I have to get through the moon.” Remus sighed, and he pinched the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger. He looked pained, sad. 

“I’ve got Wolfsbane,” She remarked automatically. She always had it ready for him when he visited; she’d had more than enough time to prepare the potion basically perfectly, but she silently berated herself for being so eager to please him, so happy to help. He had been keeping things from her, lying to her. She knew that he had to, that every single person she cared about kept things from her, but the necessary betrayal from this man felt different. 

He smiled softly, sadness still lingering at the edge of his eyes. “Thank you,” he whispered and turned to her to take her hand. “I’ll have to get through the moon first, but then I will take you to Ron.” 

Hermione nearly choked on a gasp, fear and hope mixing within her in an all-encompassing cocktail. She clutched his hand to steady herself as if she were toppling forwards, and she realised when Remus caught her body in his arms that she would have collapsed if not for him. He slowly, with gentle precision, arranged his body so it leant up against the wall, and he held her against his chest with their legs out in front of them. Small hushing sounds slipped from his lips, and he gripped her tightly. The only thing that alerted her to her tears was when he lifted her chin and swiped one with his thumb over his face. 

“I’ll take you to Ron,” he continued, “and we’ll take him to Harry, and you will try your theory. You’ve been here long enough, Hermione.” 

His voice saying her name soothed something open and raw inside of her. She placed a kiss to his palm that still rested on her chin. 

They didn’t talk anymore. In truth, she couldn’t think of anything to say. 

Remus Lupin had come to Lyon, taught her Legilimency and was suddenly giving her everything she had dreamed of for the past four years. Though her mind listed reasons none of this would work, logically and meticulously catagorising themselves ready for when she wasn’t flooded with the warmth of Remus’ skin against her own, she couldn’t bring herself to care. 

Remus’ breathing became slow and even before hers did. As safe as she felt in his arms, it was still August in southern France, and she was forced to untangle herself from him to press her face against her cool pillow. 

As she studied his profile before her eyelids started to droop, she wondered about the part of himself he kept tethered in his head. She wondered what Moony was feeling, whether Remus would let her talk to him again, and whether one day, maybe, he would let himself be whole. 


	12. Chapter 12

****

**Lyon**

Hermione woke up quite early the next morning but obviously not as early as Remus, he was gone. She felt a slow, reliable panic fill her, pushing her muscles from the bed as she walked through to the living area. She found him leaning against the counter of her kitchenette, blowing air on to the surface of a cup of tea. Relief chased through her; he hadn’t abandoned her again, but she was disappointed to find him fully dressed while she remained naked. 

Realisation struck her as she thought back to the previous evening: they had both been almost in exactly the same positions. Him clothed and her naked in her kitchen. The sleepiness in his expression completely fell away in favour of a brief flash of raw hunger that hung on his features. His mouth opened slightly, his tongue flicking out to his bottom lip. His eyes, completely golden, seared into her. 

“We should talk first,” she blurted out, walking backward towards her bedroom door. Out of instinct, she didn’t let him out of her sight. However, he didn’t feel dangerous to her—she was  _ excited.  _ She couldn’t trust herself not to just fall at his feet, let him lose himself in her like he had the evening before. 

“We should.” His voice came out low and broken, and his eyes flickered to their deep sea green, but the gold won out. “You need to practice more,” he added, but she couldn’t tell if he was talking to her or to himself. Heart racing, she placed her hand behind her back as she walked over the threshold of the bedroom. 

Her hand closed around the door knob and quickly slammed it shut. She didn’t have a lot of time, his body weight crashing against the door frame from the outside, so she grabbed her wand from amongst the covers and whispered a strong locking charm. Then she threw her wand back across the bed so that she wouldn’t be tempted to immediately let him back in. 

Hands shaking, Hermione looked around the room. Clothes. She would need clothes. With the door to the room closed, it was already getting warm. She picked out a t-shirt and denim shorts from her chest of drawers and then had the world’s quickest shower before putting on her clean clothes. Finding it difficult to talk herself into wearing a bra, she settled for a white cotton one that was neither sexy nor prudish. 

Finally, she grabbed her wand once more and unlocked the door, bracing herself for Remus’ entrance. 

Several moments passed after the lock clicked free but, he didn’t try. She appreciated his attempt at privacy, but a small ball of disappointment settled in her stomach. 

However, as she opened the door and walked out into the space, Remus’ body slammed into her, pressing her against the wall next to the door. His mouth was on hers in a bone-crushing kiss. The slow sweep of his tongue against her bottom lip and his hand in her hair made her forget about herself for an instant. 

The hand that wasn’t slowly fisting in her hair grabbed at every part of her body he could reach before he flicked open the button-fly of her shorts. 

“Bend your knee,” he ordered as he took a breath from her mouth. His lips travelled the plane of her cheekbone before he jerked her head back with his fist and pulled his open mouth along the line of her throat. She did as directed, and he thrust his knee between her legs. The pressure along the centre seam of her shorts instantly jolted through her dampening core, and she was unable to choke back the whine that slipped from her throat. He chuckled lowly before biting down on her earlobe. 

“There is absolutely,” he whispered in a strained tone, slipping his fingers under her cotton underwear, “ _ no way  _ that I am going to be able to make him behave unless he can watch you come.”

\-----

_ I am never going to get enough of watching her come, idiot.  _ Moony growled as Remus felt the soft curls that lay beneath Hermione’s knickers. 

The smell of her was intoxicating; Remus felt like he’d drunk a bottle of wine. He burrowed his nose into her hair as he softly glided his middle finger over the outside of her slit. Hermione was dripping, and she made a breathy sound that might have been a laugh, but she choked on it as he applied a little more pressure, cupping her sex entirely. 

Her cunt was a marvel. Soft and wet, it smelled like nothing he could describe. He could picture her puffy pink flesh from when he was on his knees for her the day before, and he felt the beginnings of his own end. She hadn’t touched him, and yet she had him facing his release like a teenager. 

“Remus,” she gasped as he finally pushed past her lips and placed his middle and index finger on either side of her clit. She rolled her hips, and her hip bone brushed against his, eliciting a shudder from him.

_ If you come before she does, I will throw us off the roof of this building,  _ Moony roared.

Remus took a steadying breath and stepped back half an inch so that he wouldn’t run the risk of her grinding against him again. She made a low, disappointed moan that climbed a decibel at the end when he started to move his fingers in concentric circles around the hardening peak of her clitoris. He vowed he would try to ring the high-pitched noises from her for the rest of his life if it made her happy. Every noise she made, every clasp of her fingers against his neck and shoulders, made light burst inside him. 

A fluttering pulse started under his fingers, and her hips started to buck wildly away from the wall he pinned her to, and she opened her eyes. Her warm, deep honey eyes lit up from behind and begged him for things he didn’t understand, and she collapsed against the wall, her body held up only by his fist in her hair and his knee between her legs. 

\-----

As the room came back into focus and Hermione’s pulse died down in her ears, she could hear Remus whispering into her skin. 

“So good,” he mouthed against the skin of her collarbone. “Want to watch you come every minute of every day.” 

From beneath hooded eyes, she could see that he had torn the collar of her t-shirt so he could run his teeth and tongue across her shoulder and up her neck while rubbing his obvious erection against her hip. 

Hermione latched her fingers around the belt hoops of his trousers and buried her nose in Remus’ hair. A tightness in her chest started to pull stronger at the thought that she was doing this to him. 

He was a man in his forties, yet he was rutting against her like a teenager. 

“Remus,” she choked, cupping his jaw so he’d look at her. 

His eyes were, at first glance, still entirely golden, but she could see a ring of pure sea green starting around the edge of his iris. He was his whole self with her. 

Remus could talk about the part of him he denied was human, like he was a different person, but Hermione could see so clearly that it was all him. He was a man. A kind, generous, intelligent man, who just so happened to also harbor a beast. A cunning, selfish, feral beast that needed to have a little more room to grow. The look in Remus’ eyes was almost one of shame, and her heart broke as he growled and shuddered against her. 

He took several deep breaths before he simply slumped to his knees in front of her with his forehead resting against her thigh. 

“I’m so sorry,” he whimpered against her leg. 

“What?” Hermione was blindsided by his apology. Why would he be sorry? Was he going to say that this was all a mistake? Was he sorry he had kissed her? That he had even touched her? She placed her hand carefully on his hair and stroked his scalp with the tips of her fingers. He seemed to be desolate at her feet, defeated. 

“I’m so sorry that I couldn’t tell you about Ron. I couldn’t run the risk that you’d go to him. You’d risk your life for him, and it wasn’t a risk that I could allow. I couldn’t let you die. I can’t let you die,” he panted, kissing the skin above her knee. His words were so close to those spoken by the Remus she had built for herself in her mind that she shook her head a little to make sure that he was real. 

He finally looked up at her, his eyes glossy but deep sea green. She smiled at him, finding it difficult not to show too many of her teeth. An overwhelming happiness blossomed within her. He really wanted her; he would protect her. 

She knew the risks of leaving Lyon with him, and she knew that crossing the continent might be the most dangerous thing she’d done since riding on the back of a dragon, but doing so with this man was her best chance of her doing it safely. 

“Breakfast,” she said, still unable to stop her smile. “Breakfast and then Occlumency.” 

Remus smiled back at her, the sadness in his eyes dissipating. It did awful, fluttering things to her stomach, and she briefly worried if she would be able to concentrate enough to even remove herself from the wall let alone test her Occlumency skills, but she rightened herself and followed him from the room, her heart lighter than it’d been in months. 

\-----

The next day, Remus awoke early again, but after making herself a cup of tea and wandering around the apartments, Hermione found him in Apartment Eight. She hadn’t been there in a long time; it was mostly muggle medical journals and some healing texts she had brought from the Elgin safehouse. 

She and Remus had been having the same argument on and off for the majority of the two days they’d been there together. In the beginning, he had found it quite easy to distract her from her point, but now she was wise to his tactics of seduction and was ready for one last go at convincing him. 

“I simply do not understand why I’m required to lock you in a cage,” Hermione growled as she walked out of Apartment Eight and into Seven, where she had found that Remus had not only moved the piles of books into one corner of the room but had also erected a large cage in the centre of the parquet flooring. She stood there for a moment and waited for him to catch up. 

He settled his hands on her shoulders from behind her, and she did her best not to flinch. She hadn’t had this amount of physical affection maybe in her whole life, and she had been isolated for such a long time that someone touching her casually unmoored her every time he did so. Remus, of course, would see this as her hesitancy, that she regretted what they had spent the last days doing, so she did her best to temper her reaction. 

“You know why,” he murmured, placing a kiss on the crown of her head. 

“I know why you think it is necessary, but I think you know very well that your view of the situation and the objective reality are wildly different,” she countered, turning to face him if only so that she was no longer required to look at the cage. “Have you been having problems with the batches of Wolfsbane that I have been brewing you?”

“No, not at all. You brew it perfectly,” he predictably replied and looked her dead in the eye. He would defend her to the death, even to herself. 

“Have you, while changed under the Wolfsbane potion, had the urge to fight or kill other people?” she inquired, leading him to a conclusion he was so adamant to be blind to. 

“No but that doesn’t me—”

“I won’t be requiring anything other than a yes or no at this time in the conversation.” She held up her hand in front of him, and he rolled his eyes at her. Gold was starting to roll across them like storm clouds, as she had observed that he found it much harder to tether Moony in those last few days before the moon.

“So the Wolfsbane is working perfectly, you have not felt the urge to harm or kill other people while using it during the change, and I still can’t simply lock you in a room?”

“That’s about it, yes.” He smirked. 

\-----

_ Take her now,  _ Moony demanded. 

He was so close to the surface that Remus felt him under his skin. His fingers twitched with the need to touch her. He couldn’t remember how soft her skin was, and he needed to be reminded. 

The ends of her hair snapped and crackled with magic as she paced in circles around the cage he kept with him while he was on the run. It was larger than he was used to, but he found he hurt himself less given the extra space. 

\-----

That night, as she paced the landing, Hermione thought that others must think she never got scared at all. Her actions throughout the war and even before it were evidence enough. Fighting a troll aged eleven, going into the Chamber of Secret aged twelve... maybe they thought she simply ran into those situations without a care in the world. But that wasn’t bravery; that was stupidity. Hermione was brave  _ because  _ she was scared. 

This is what she kept in mind when she pushed open the door to Apartment Seven. She had walked into this space so many times, not only in real life but also in her mind, that she could navigate through the hallway in the dark without an issue. She stepped lightly, talking herself through the facts of the situation. 

Remus was a werewolf. Remus was a werewolf that had taken Wolfsbane. Although he was now stronger and more dangerous than he was when he was a man, he was able to think and act with his human mind. When he saw her walk through the door into the large living space, he would recognise her as Hermione, not as a meal. This is what she knew. 

Opening the door very slowly, taking care not to make any jerky movements, she stepped carefully into the room and closed the door behind her softly. He was asleep. She wasn’t able to see the details of his form, only his furry outline that slowly expanded and contracted as the soft, slow breathing sounds of a large animal came from inside the cage. 

Concentrating all of her magic on being  _ quiet,  _ Hermione summoned some books from the stack Remus had made in the corner and transfigured them into a large, comfortable chair. 

As she sat down in the chair, ready to settle in for the rest of the night, she was grateful for the unusually cool night air that permeated the apartments. It was often so hot through the summer here, it became impossible to sleep some nights. She tried to avoid cooling charms as she would need to use them so regularly that the magic would be easily detectable. 

It occurred to her that since he’d arrived, she hadn’t felt the inclination to go to the banister at all. She’d even walked past it tonight without looking at it. Remus’ safety, his concerns for her safety, and her frustrations with him had completely taken up all the space in her mind. When she had practiced Occluding this evening while Remus got ready, she noticed that the door to the room she kept him in was open. He was free to wander around her mind with his optimism and self-preservation. She found herself disinclined to put him back in his place. 

She thought about Ron again, the boy who stood soaked in her mind in the doorway to apartment five. He never moved, never spoke to her. He just looked at her as she stood in front of him and wept for her lost friend. 

Except, upon recent discovery, he wasn’t so lost. 

Remus had promised her that he would take her to Ron after the moon. He had whispered into the skin of her back that he would take her to Ron and then take her to Harry. He’d kissed her skin and spoke of saving Harry, of reuniting her with the only people she had left in her life. With the memory of his breath on her skin shivering through her, she couldn’t bring herself to disagree with him, couldn’t ruin his plan with her logic and reason. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The beauty of only updating every two weeks is that in between updates, so much can happen in my life! For example, this week, I almost _died._ I went to bed with a tummy ache last Sunday and by four am on Monday I was in the hospital with a gangrenous appendix. Which, yes, does mean that my appendix died inside of me. Now, I have no appendix and I am in recovery but Remus and Hermione are still on their shit so here we are. I'm very grateful to those in the fandom who fucking rallied around me including the BEAUTIFUL flowers that [MaraudingManaged](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MaraudingManaged) sent me and I am so SUPER grateful to the NHS who were fucking great. 


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The GORGEOUS artwork is by my wonderful beta Ravenslight and hold a clue about where we're going next... can you guess?

**Lyon**

Remus hadn’t spoken to her for most of the morning following the full moon, although he did let her heal some small surface tears in his skin around his shoulders. She winced as she worked at a cut on his pectorals which looked to be the deepest, from his attempt to escape the cage when he had seen her waiting for him in her conjured chair. She refused to feel guilty for proving that he wouldn’t hurt her; once he got over the shock of seeing her, he had been calm. Docile. 

He had been full of rage when he woke up. Once she had healed him and given him a pain potion, he stormed out of the room and down to apartment one where he slammed at least three doors. He had stayed there for the majority of the day until, when she was pulling some rice off the hob and frying some mushrooms in a pan, he emerged into the space of her service apartment. 

He stared at the sofa for a little while as she made a conscious effort not to look at him at all. When he sat down, he had to move some parchments she had been working on that day in between being frustrated with him and feeling guilty about pushing his boundaries. Hermione didn’t know what to say, so she plated their dinner very slowly in order to rehearse what she would say to him in her head. She sighed and gave him a small smile as she placed their plates in front of their places at the coffee table. Turning to the kitchen, she found the only bottle of wine she had come into contact with her entire time here. She had never needed it before, but it seemed like the occasion called for it. 

\---

Hermione brought a very dusty looking bottle of wine and two mugs over to the coffee table and put it down in front of him. He could feel her anxiety rolling off her in waves and could hear her heart hamming in her chest. 

This was probably it, he thought. She was going to explain to him that he wasn’t worth it, that she couldn’t cope with the realities of his condition. 

When he had woken up in the middle of the night to her sitting on a comfortable chair he had, admittedly, panicked. She was right, of course; she never stopped being right. 

He was in control. 

He saw her and was terrified, not only that there was even a possibility of him hurting her but also because, when he was a wolf, there was no Occlumency. His feelings for her would be fully on display. He whined and pined for her all night, and he couldn’t stop the small high-pitched sound that escaped him as he breathed. 

“Are you healed?” Hermione asked, looking softly into his eyes before catching herself and looking away to stare down at the carpet. 

“I’ll live,” he nodded, automatically. His usual responses to questions after his health that avoided the subject of how he felt, seemed wrong when it was her. 

For the rest of their meal, they spoke back and forth very quietly, she gave small smiles and laughed when he said something funny. Her breath became a little short when he smiled, and after they’d finished their meal and they’d both had two mugs of wine, she stood next to the sofa with her arm stretched out towards him. 

\----

He had been blindsided by her invitation for his hand and she readied herself for the rejection she was expecting. She had worked the nerve to do this, to take him to her bed, over the course of the meal. When he hadn’t rejected her for going against his wishes the night before, Remushad seemed to relax into their conversation. He took her hand, and she walked them to her bedroom. She knew he wouldn’t be able to maul her as he had two nights previously, but she needed to feel him—solid, breathing and well next—to her. 

She needed to know that he wanted to be there. 

Once Remus stood up, he towered over her. The nights before, he had either been on his knees or laying beside her. She hadn’t thought about how large he was compared to her, and now she felt fragile next to him. 

He lifted the back of his hand to her and softly trailed his knuckles across her cheek bones. She couldn’t stop the smile that climbed her face in response, and his lips pulled together as his gaze took her in. Dark green rolled across gold like waves, and she heard a rumble from his chest. 

“Go lay down,” he murmured against the curls on top of her head as he kissed them. 

Hermione wasn’t usually one to take orders, but she had found herself doing what Remus had told her to do without a second thought. As she walked into her bedroom. she could hear the clinking of their bowls and cups from the dinner they had eaten. 

Hermione stood staring at her bed, thinking about what she was about to do. Less than twelve hours ago she had healed wounds on this man, and he had seemed to drag his body out of the room as quickly as he could when she was done. But she wanted to look after him, show him that he deserved care and attention. Show him that he meant more to him than the two nights they had spent in her bed. 

Pulling off her shorts and t-shirt, having gone without a bra that morning, she slid across the sheets of her bed and laid on her side on the far side of the mattress. She continued to listen to Remus in the other room and worked out that he must be washing up. Hermone propped herself up on her elbow and closed her eyes briefly. She listened to the soft water sounds and the little sharp cracks of plates being stacked. Was he making her wait on purpose? She could feel every nerve ending, her anticipation of him walking into the room was overwhelming. 

When he finally entered the room, Remus looked down at her with a softness in his expression that she was not expecting. He removed his clothes but left his pants on, the soft light from the dark world outside casting a shadow over the hard plains of his muscles. 

She had waited for him—had been so  _ still _ —that she had started to think her arousal might just go on and on and never stop from the anticipation. He knelt on the bedside before laying down without touching her at all. 

She thought she might scream. 

He turned to her, and she watched the waves of gold roll across his irises again, but the green beneath them was deep and strong. He must have been tired if he would just let Moony roll around inside his head untethered. “Get on top of me.” 

Remus patted his thighs a little to make his point, and Hermione looked at him a second before her smile stretched across her face. She knelt up on the bed and straddled either side of his hips so that she sat atop of his thighs. 

“No,” he scolded roughly, grabbing her hips hard enough to leave bruises. “Here.” He sharply dragged her pelvis up so that her cunt settled perfectly over the unmistakable ridge of his half-hard cock. 

She took a sharp breath as she felt her cotton knickers press against her slit. The pressure on her clitoris was barely there, but the promise in his eyes made her whimper. 

For a second, he only looked at her. All the lights were off in the flat, and only a faint glow from the night outside lit the room, but she could somehow see everything she needed to. She wondered if Moony was okay, wondered how he was affected by being let out of the prison of Remus’ mind during the moon only to be tied back down again. 

All thoughts escaped her as the weight of his stare pressed against her, an ache of longing coiling tight in her core until she couldn’t take it anymore. Peppering kisses along his jawline first, she found the courage that had pushed her to watch him change in his cage and worked her way down his chest. 

Scars littered her skin there, including his splinching he’d arrived in Lyon with and the injuries he’d caused himself the previous night. She paid special attention to these, running her tongue across the sensitive flesh of his ribs and causing him to hiss above her and sink his fingers into her curls. 

When she arrived at the line of his pants, she inhaled deeply to catch the deep sex smell that rolled off him. It was heady, intoxicating, and it pushed her to tug down his boxers to reveal his cock. It hadn’t been a trick of the light before. She hadn’t been mistaken by the shadows; he was huge. 

Steeling herself, she licked a slow path up his cock from the base to the head, moaning low in her throat. His harsh breathing stuttered, and he shifted beneath her. Hermione traced the point of her tongue over the seam between his foreskin and glan, and then followed it up to the slit in the tip, teasing him just a bit before sucking the whole head into her mouth. 

He made an incoherent sound, and she grinned around him, taking him in one hand. She sat up and, with as much aim as possible, spat a glob of saliva on to his cock. 

His eyes widened at the sight, and she gave him a lazy smile and held eye contact as she stroked the wetness down his shaft. When she lowered her head again, she never broke her gaze from his, preferring to hold him as a captive audience while she licked and sucked the hard flesh her pumping first didn’t cover. 

She didn't have to carry on for very long; her slow, steady strokes, sucking mouth, and wriggling tongue brought him to the edge quicker than she expected, perhaps because he was still recovering from his change. Gasping and writhing, he groaned. “Hermione, I’m—” but he didn’t finish his sentence as his cock jerked in her hand and his cum hit the back of her throat. She let a little dribble out of her mouth and onto her fingers, still squeezing and stroking him as he pulsed, but she raised her head before he could become oversensitive.

Gaining his composure, chest heaving, his pupils glowed. He pulled her wrists into his hands, and before she could let out her squeak of protest, he hauled her up his body and rolled her onto her back, pinning her. One hand moved down her stomach, and she whined. 

“I will go utterly mad if I can’t make you come,” he groaned, and his tongue fluttered over the pulse point under her ear. 

  
  
  
  
  


They woke up the next morning in a sweaty knot of limbs. The humid nights had returned and both of them had been awake several times throughout the night, but Hermione still felt energised. 

He was still there, in her bed. She pushed her palm into the muscle of his back and over his shoulder to squeeze on the tension from it, and he groaned, stretching his face to kiss the tips of her fingers. 

When he turned around, he said the words she had been waiting to hear since she had left his mind. “I know how to get us to Amsterdam.” 

They packed their things silently, and Hermione walked in loops around the service apartment. Downstairs, she heard the creek of floorboards where Remus was retrieving the books they would need from downstairs. When Remus returned upstairs, he placed the books on the bed where she had stacked piles of clothes, potions and parchments neatly next to the beaded bag. 

“Take me through it again,” Hermione breathed, sitting down on the bed with her hands in her lap. 

Remus took her fingers in his own and threaded them together, his kindest eyes shining down at her as she looked up. 

“We’ll get the Voyage de Magique to Lille,” he recited, repeating his script from earlier. “But then we’ll switch to the Muggle train to Amsterdam so that it’s less obvious that we’re magical when we’re exiting the central station.”

“How long is the walk?” Hermione asked, her hand tensing rhythmically in his. 

“Not far,” he sighed, sitting down next to her and pulling her to his side. 

Warmth from his body seeped into hers, and in any other situation she might have allowed herself to sink into him, but finding comfort in him felt trivial. Kissing his cheek, she stood and looked down at the items on the bed and made a quick calculation of how best to pack them. 

\-----

Remus sat on the edge of the bed and watched Hermione shrink things and place them in her beaded bag, her delicate hands counting everything and placing them delicately in the bag.Guilt had begun to roll over his body in waves; he was taking her from safety. 

She had been safe here for years, but he reminded himself that his intent was good. He was helping her back to her friend. 

She’d been silent since his explanation, but now she rose, taking a plate of biscuits and a single galleon to the windowsill.The Niffler that he had seen only once before on his first visit would have to do without her for now. 

After a beat, she turned to him, straightening her shoulders despite the moisture gathered in her eyes. Lip trembling, she nodded. “Let’s go.”

Standing straight in the middle of the service apartment, he shrank his trunk and slipped it back in his pocket. His hand in Hermione’s, he watched her eyes grow glassy as she looked around the space. Remus looked down at her and watched a tear over spill her lashes before Apparating them out of the apartment and back to the abandoned car park near the train station. 

\-----

_ CRACK. _

As soon as Hermione’s feet touched the ground, chaos erupted around them. 

“There!”

“It’s them!”

They were surrounded. 

Death Eaters flanked them on all sides. Pulse thundering, she felt adrenalin tear through her body like fire. It was incredible. She hadn’t used anything more than a mild warming charm in so long that the unfamiliar feeling of a large amount of magic at her disposal made a short laugh escape her throat. 

Remus was already in action. His wand arced through the air, firing spells at the men who had been waiting for them.

She had never been safe, not in the apartments and not outside of them. Harsh knowledge fell over her: she wouldn’t be safe for a very long time. She slipped her wand into her hand, ready to protect herself as she crouched in a defensive position.. 

“ _ Sectumsempra!”  _ she screamed and watched one of the Death Eaters’ masks fall off, blood pooling around Antonin Dolohov’s face. The magic she could feel pulsing around her body crackled over her skin and through her hair; she felt alive and vulnerable but reassuringly powerful at the same time. She could feel Remus’ back at her own, and one of his hands grabbed her before he twirled her around to face him. 

His eyes were all gold, his mouth was wide and baring almost all of his teeth. He looked more like the man that lived in his mind than she’d ever seen in real life. He had her flush against him, his nose in her hair before he aimed a flaying curse at an attacker behind her and they both winked out of existence. 

Remus slammed her against a wall the second their feet hit the ground. His entire body pushed into every section of hers. 

“Mm—” She tried to speak, but Remus put his hand over her mouth and made shushing noises as he guaranteed that they were alone. Once it was clear that the only people around them were Muggles making their way to the side entrance of the station, he was on her. 

Powerfully, he claimed her mouth as he pushed both of his hands into her hair. His wand was still clasped in one of them, and the hard wood pressed against her scalp, but she found she didn’t care as she pressed back into him. His short fingernails scraped her hairline as his teeth scuffed her bottom lip. She tried to inhale, but he took that as an opportunity to curl his tongue along the roof of her mouth in a way that triggered a sense memory in her clitoris, and her thighs tensed together against the wall behind her. 

“We’re going to miss the train,” he growled against her lips before pressing a smooth, chaste kiss to them and taking her hand. 

He guided her through the crowd of the train station, and she peered rapidly left to right as they walked; she’d never come this far into the building before. She found it incredibly difficult to concentrate on where she was going, and gratitude for Remus’ steady hand in hers flooded through her. The more people that surrounded them, the less safe she felt, and just before Remus pulled her onto a large, dark green steam train, her breathing became uneven. 

“It’s ok,” he whispered against her temple as he sat them down in an empty compartment. “I’ve got you.” 

**Amsterdam**

It must have been very, very late. Hermione hadn’t kept track since Lyon and now she found that she would have liked to know the time. They had walked from the train station, across a bridge, and then moved down streets that took them to the left. 

The cobbled streets were dark and slick with rain. Few people scuttled through the streets, lending an eerie element to the night. This place was made for people of the night, all neon signs and women lit behind glass doors. But there was no one here on this street. Remus looked down at the paper in his hand, trying to find the correct address. 

Hermione hadn’t stopped touching Remus in some way or another since they left Lyon. She had found it so difficult to be around people, especially in the busy Lille train station, that he had alternated holding her hand or having an arm around her. Remus had put both their bodies inside his big navy wool coat on the train from Lyon, where she had been able to pretend that they were still laying on the sofa in front of the fire in her service apartment. She spent the trip breathing in his scent and pretending. 

Now Remus held her hand, his thumb running circles over her knuckles. She looked up at him, and he pulled her to him and kissed her temple. Hermione and the werewolf next to her watched the street in front of them, focused and quiet. 

“It should be over here on the left,” he said, turning to her. His eyes widened when they made contact with her own.. He quickly stepped closer to her, worry evident on his face. “Are you alright?” he asked her, lifting her chin with his fingertips.

“I’ll have to be,” she said. She knew that there was no way that her fears surrounding being outside or being around people held a candle to the prospect of finding Ron. She would have to take a deep breath and push forward. She had done more terrifying things than stand in the street in the middle of the night; she would do what she had to. Her posture and face must have changed because Remus smiled at her and moved from where they stood. He moved first, leading both of them towards a large wooden door that was painted in black lacquer. 

He knocked on the door, and after a beat of silence,a small woman answered. She was someone that could have been thirty-five or sixty or anywhere in between. She was so small and fair that she could have been a fairy. A pale blue blouse hung over beige cotton trousers, and her nude high heels click-clacked over the polished wooden floor as she led all three of them down a hallway with dark green wallpaper. 

At some point, Hermione had been pushed in front now, Remus close behind her with his hand on her back. She could feel his warmth through her clothes, but she felt like it wasn’t entirely for her comfort either; neither of them were used to travelling with more than themselves to protect. 

“You will need to sign our visitor's book,” the small woman said, her voice lower than Hermione was expecting. They each took the Muggle biro sitting next to a large book that looked a little like a photo album, both signing their names in the book along with the date. When Hermione saw that Remus had used his real name, her thoughts of hiding her identity went away, and she passed the pen back to the woman. “Do you have any requests?” 

“We know—I mean, do you have any male redheads?” Remus asked, putting down the pen and looking down at their guide to the Muggle brothel. 

“I do. Very tall. Very athletic,” she said, trying to sell Ron’s body to them. 

Bile rose up in her throat, her heart threatening to explode from her chest. She wanted to run up the stairs behind the woman and tear the building apart. They were so close to him, so close to finding her friend who everyone else assumed dead. That only a handful of them hoped would be alive and he might be here—he  _ was  _ here. She could feel it. 

She knew that first, before she would see her friend, she would need this woman to believe that they were here to have sex with Ron. The woman was unlikely to let them just walk away with a source of her income, so Hermione tried to arrange her features into those of a woman who would bring her lover to a brothel to have sex with another man. Whatever that looked like. Remus must have affirmed that the woman’s description was what they were looking for because all of a sudden Remus’ hand had returned to her back, and he guided her to follow the woman up the stairs that faded into the illicit darkness of the brothel. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A week late so that Ravenslight could have her wisdom teeth taken out, but that means that you'll be getting two weeks of Remus & Hermione's European road trip on the trot! I'll be posting next Tuesday and then we'll be back to every other week.


	14. Chapter 14

**Amsterdam**

Remus handed the brothel owner a large stack of Muggle money, and Hermione tried to school her features. Of course they would need to pay to enter the room. She couldn’t simply barge in where her best friend was being kept no matter how much she wanted to. They couldn’t arouse any suspicion.

After knocking on the door in front of them once, the woman shook Remus’ hand and walked back towards the stairs. They both waited, hardly breathing, until they heard the echo of the woman’s high heels click on the polished floor of the hallway downstairs. 

Hermione put her hand on the door frame to steady herself, but Remus appeared to have had enough waiting because he pushed the door open and pulled Hermione inside. The door closed and locked as Remus muttered spells under his breath, but the sound of his voice was drowned out by the roar of blood in her ear drums because lying face down on the bed was Ron Weasley. 

She couldn’t see his face, and his long, lean, muscled body had a glamour on it so strong that he seemed to glow, but it was him. 

\-----

Remus watched, helpless, as Hermione stared at Ron on the bed. He’d known, of course he had, that he would be forced to watch the reunion of these friends who had once thought themselves more. These people that were age appropriate and safe for one another. He thought he might be sick in his mouth from the panic that rooted him to the spot behind her. 

_ She’s staring at him,  _ Moony snarled.  _ Why is she staring at him?  _

Not having an answer and refusing to acknowledge one that might tear apart the world he had built around her, he pushed himself into action. Walking around where she stood frozen, he started to cast very basic diagnostic charms on the boy in the bed. He had never known what all of the colours meant as they shimmered over the body beneath him, but he knew enough to be sure that Ron was physically healthy but drugged out of his mind. 

“Portkeys, Hermione,” Remus said, trying to make eye contact with her, but tears she couldn’t conceal were running down her cheeks as she fixated on Ron’s prone form. His statement must have jolted her out of the spell she was under though because within a second she was arm deep in her beaded bag and throwing a Muggle hair elastic at him. She held a yoghurt pot lid in her hand and looked at him with lost, scared eyes so illuminated with fear that it hurt, like looking at an especially bright light. 

She blinked, and when a tear ran down her cheek, his heart broke in two, but before he could react, he clasped his hand around Ron’s wrist and the Portkey activated with a pull behind his navel. With a blink,they disappeared from the brothel in Amsterdam.

\-----

**Bruges**

All three of them hit the floorboards, and Hermione felt the pain of impact shatter through her shins and rocket up her spine as the heels of her feet and her coccyx slammed into the ground. It took her a second to work out if she was going to vomit; she’d never Portkeyed while crying before, and it wasn’t something she’d ever want to do again. Her stomach swooped and fell, she slowly stood up and made sure that Remus wouldn’t drop Ron from where he had the redhead’s arm slung around his shoulders.

Inky black hair magnified in her peripheral vision. 

Severus Snape was sitting upright but clearly exhausted in a four poster bed that reminded her of Hogwarts, and he looked almost bored that the three of them had blinked into existence in his bedroom. He even had the presence of mind to sneer a little at her before she turned, wide-eyed, to Remus. The werewolf who was all but carrying her best friend had the good sense to look a little sheepish.

Hermione felt irritation bubble in her; she was tired of being shocked by everything she didn’t know. 

She was Hermione Granger; she knew things. 

Saying something that she didn’t hear over the whirring of her brain, Remus hobbled out, dragging Ron with him. She found that he couldn’t take her eyes off the young man. Not until his feet slipped beyond the door frame did she turn back to face the current revelation. 

Taking a deep breath, Hermione stood at the foot of the bed. She had known in theory that Snape hadn’t died in 1998; she’d known that her stasis charm had been very good. 

When she had come face-to-face with her Potions professor bleeding profusely onto the floor of the boat house, she hadn’t thought about what she had done—she just did it. The snake escaped without attacking anyone else; it’s life had been too important to fight Hermione when she’d pulled it from Snape’s neck, using the stasis charm she’d practiced for months in the tent to temporarily mend the wound in his neck. 

On the run, it had not only kept the tent from falling in bad weather or letting water in, but it had also kept all the other barrier charms and wards she had set up from wearing away as well. When she had used it on Snape, she hadn’t thought about the consequences of that. 

She hadn’t thought that maybe Severus Snape was better off dead. 

Looking at him in the blinding summer sunshine, she could see that he was dieing. Maybe he had been dying since she’d last seen him four years ago, but her spell had not only stopped the bleeding; it had also stopped Nagini’s venom from working, holding him captive in a semi-existence near death. A roll of guilt swept from under her stomach, and if she had eaten anything since the dinner with Remus on their last night in Lyon, she probably would have been sick. How awful it must be for this man to have fought for so long, to have been on guard his entire life, only to be rewarded with living his life in a slow crawl towards death. 

“Yes,” Snape sneered a little, his voice weak and tired. “I daresay I deserve an apology.” 

Suddenly, without a conscious effort or any warning-

_ Severus Snape was in her mind. She could see his boots on the floorboards on the landing of the apartments, could feel his cool hands on the banister.  _

Her _ banister.  _

_ Closing her eyes, Hermione slammed every door of the apartments closed.  _ _ She raced to find Ron, coiled her hand around his wrist, and shooed him into apartment five, carefully locking the door behind him. Remus sat at the dining table in apartment eight with a cup of tea in his hand, and she ignored his protests as she slammed the door and locked it in his face. _ _ Every book passage she had committed to memory, the study holding Bellatrix’s knife, even the room she safely and securely held Bellatrix herself in, closed. Locked.  _

“Who taught you to do that?” Snape demanded. His voice was so sharp that she removed herself from her mind very quickly although she ensured that her doors stayed closed, all the locks still in their place. Snape might be able to enter her mind without permission or detection, but he would see nothing but the foyer of french empire-style apartments. 

“Who taught me to do what?” she whispered, wishing that Remus was in the room, that someone could help her escape the black stare of the man in the bed. 

“You can  _ Occlude _ ,” he said, scepticism dripping from his every syllable. They might as well have been in the dungeons of Hogwarts for all the memories his tone brought back to her. “Who taught you to do that?” 

He spoke slowly, derisively, as if he were speaking to someone especially slow. No one had spoken to Hermione like that since she had last come into contact with the man in front of her. Though then she had been a student, someone craving the approval of the men and women that taught her; now she was a woman. She was a person who had had to navigate her way into adulthood by herself. She couldn’t crave the approval of others when there weren't others to approve anything that she did; she had been relying on herself for too long for this weak, dying man’s attitude to slow her down. 

“I did,” she countered, looking him square in the eye. “Remus has been testing my Legilimency but I’ve read just about every book I could on Occlumency, and I’ve been training myself since March.” 

There was a flicker, a blink and she’d miss it, of disbelief. It wasn’t mocking her—it wasn’t underestimating her. It felt almost like he was impressed, but this was Severus Snape, and she was Hermione Granger, and he would never be impressed with anything she did. She’d settle for him no longer actively insulting her intelligence. 

“‘Mione?” Ron’s voice was behind her, and she spun, her heart pounding when she saw him in the doorway. 

No longer naked, Remus had wrapped him in a bedspread, and the pale glow of his skin was gone, a sallow dullness swallowing his complexion whole. She had known when she first saw him that it had been a glamour—his skin wasn’t pale and milky but covered in freckles and a flush of pink over almost every area. His face looked thinner than she’d ever seen it, but it was also stronger; he was a man now. 

He wasn’t the boy she’d kissed in the Chamber of Secrets, flushed with success and humour; he was a man who had been trapped as much as she had. 

For a second, it occurred to her that there may be no one in the world that understood her more than Ron Weasley did, and a wave of relief hit her because no matter how much she had thought she’d loved him in her teens and no matter how much they may have shared experience through this war, she was no longer attracted to him. 

“Can absolutely no one think of anything but sexual attraction at all times?” Snape groaned from the bed. Hermione slammed shut the door that Snape had pried open in her mind as she considered Ron’s appearance. She snorted, but before she could think of a comeback, Ron seemed to swing and slump against the doorway. He could clearly no longer hold himself up, and before Hermione had a chance to try and help, Remus had gone to Ron’s other shoulder so that they carried him together. 

After a few struggling moments, they had managed to get Ron to one of the upstairs bedrooms where, Remus explained, Madam Pomfrey usually stayed as she mostly looked after Snape. When Ron had settled on the bed, they once again wrapped him up in blankets and he fell into a sleep so heavy it barely looked like he was breathing. Both Hermione and Remus stood for a long time just looking at him. 

She couldn’t figure out if something inside her felt more right with Ron there with them or if every second not in the safety of the Lyon apartments felt horrifically and irrecoverably  _ wrong. _ For long moments, she waited for Ron’s chest to lazily lift before watching it sink, revealing his rib cage. Something awful twisted in her gut and burning tears threatened the edges of her vision. Misery would have overcome her if she couldn’t find something to distract her. 

\-----

_ Comfort her, dickhead,  _ Moony growled as he paced around Remus’ mind. For being the part of him that had always wanted to tell Hermione about Ron, Moony had been in a foul mood ever since they had gotten to Amsterdam, violently switching from needing to make sure Hermione was alright to believing that she would immediately leave him— _ them _ —for Ron. 

_ She still might. _

Remus couldn’t face that right now. He had started the ball rolling on something that had to keep going. He couldn’t worry about Hermione’s affections for Ron, couldn’t be struck paralysed by fear that what they had in Lyon would have to stay there. If he concentrated too hard on the possibility that he may never get to touch her again, may never get to kiss her— 

He wouldn’t be able to face that reality. 

“I would like to practice again.” Hermione whispered, looking across the room at him through her lashes. He wasn’t sure that he’d be able to deny her anything, let alone being able to sit closely and quietly with her while she displayed such incredible magic and intellect. 

“Okay,” he replied, giving her a soft smile. Something to show her that he was on her side, anything to make her see how deeply he cared for her. He turned to a ratty armchair that sat behind him and took the seat and back cushion off to lay them down on the floor. When they had both settled on top of a cushion and were sitting close enough that he could take her hand, an overwhelming calm came over him. 

Remus concentrated on the feeling of her soft knuckles under his thumb as he stroked back and forth along her hand. The warmth of her palm against his fingertips made something inside his chest relax that he hadn’t been aware was tense. When he closed his eyes, the stillness in the house fell far away, and all he could feel was the soft puffs of her breath as they drifted over his face and the warmth of her hands. 

\-----

_ Hermione blinked, and she was in the Gryffindor Common room. When she blinked again, all she could see was his face. Moony’s face. His thumbs glided over her cheek bones before he took her jaw in his hands and maneuvered her head from side to side. Even if she had been injured or any sort of ailment showed in her features, she doubted he could see them in his imagined version of her. The concern on his face was real though. His eyes were gold, but they were deep and dull—they were tired.  _

_ “Are you alright?” he murmured as he moved his hands from her jaw over her neck and shoulders, holding her slightly away from him to look at her body.  _

_ “Moony,” she smiled, placing her hand softly on his cheek. “You know I’m alright. You’ve seen me. I know you have.”  _

_ Peering over the shoulder of this brash, angry, emotional man, she could see the calm, kind, restrained version sitting in one of the arm chairs by the fire. She could really see the differences now with them both here; the young man that stared into the flames was beautiful in an other worldly way. In a way that made her wish she had known him at that age. The sharp, handsome lines of their face were still the same, but the roadmaps of his scars were almost undetectable.  _

_ “You lie to him,” Moony whispered, folding her into his arms. He was so much taller than her that, as he put an arm around her shoulders and one to her waist, he enveloped her completely. “You shouldn’t lie to him. You’re worried about the boy.” He sounded bitter then, and she felt a puff of a scoff against her temple. It looked as though the jealousy that lived within Remus was for Moony to deal with also.  _

_ Looking up at him, she felt an overwhelming sadness for Remus. Remus was a man that believed himself to be so awful, so naturally bad, that any emotion or reaction that he deemed as negative he gave to this monster that lived inside his mind. This version of himself shouldered the burden of Remus thinking that every bad or unlikeable thing about himself could be solved if Moony didn’t exist. Remus thought somehow if he wasn’t a werewolf, that he could be a good man. As if he wasn’t already the best man she knew.  _

_ “Of course I’m worried about Ron,” she replied, trying to exude strength and control for this volatile element of the man who sat at the foot of Ron’s bed with her. “You’re worried about him, too.”  _

_ “He is,” Moony argued, looking derisively at the man sitting by the fire.  _

_ Sighing, she took his hand and moved over to the fire place where Remus sat. “You’re him too, Moony.”  _

_ Both men looked offended at that, and if she wasn’t already concentrating so hard on Legilimency, she would have laughed. This man was so intelligent, so pragmatic but empathetic—yet he somehow thought that it was possible for two separate people to live in his mind. This young Remus _ — _ she thought that perhaps he was about twenty-two like herself _ — _ was a different person to the shambolic older version, the version of himself that with enough work he would be able to rid himself of. Moony seemed to think that he was a hostage in the mind of someone completely separate from him. Both of them were idiots.  _

_ “What concerns you about my worry for Ron?” she asked both of them once she and Moony had sat on the sofa facing the fireplace and Remus.  _

_ “You’ll leave us for him,” Moony said immediately, and Remus sighed into his hand before pinching the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger. His exasperation with himself was surprising considering how much time and patience he had always had for her but she thought back to her own conversations with the Remus she kept in her mind and the arguments they’d had over valuing her life and she knew the difference.  _

_ Remus liked Hermione. Remus didn’t like Remus.  _

_ “What evidence do you have for that theory?” She wanted to continue talking to them at the same time to avoid falling for the lie that these men were different people. The only way she could think of doing so was to treat it as if they were discussing an intellectual theory and not that Remus was jealous of the sleeping boy that she hadn’t seen in more than four years.  _

_ “You loved him,” Remus said, talking for the first time since she had entered his mind. “Once. You loved him once.”  _

_ “If that was even evidence,” she countered, sitting up straighter, “which it is not, I haven’t seen Ron since the battle. I thought he was dead. I do not believe that I ever expressed romantic love for Ron to you, and I can tell you now that although there was adolescent hand holding and butterflies, I do not hold any romantic feelings for Ron Weasley.”  _

_ Both versions of Remus were quiet for a moment before they both started talking at the same time.  _

_ “You keep looking at—” _

_ “You saw him naked in Ams—”  _

_ They both stopped talking at the same time too, and she heard a few doors in the stairwells that led to the dormitories open and slam shut.  _

It went on like that for a little while. She tried very hard to remain calm and in control but whenever they spoke about her or around the feelings they may have for her, Remus had found it hard to control the Occlumency he held. She was starting to see that Remus wasn’t a particularly skilled Occlumens, but it had taught her something that she wouldn’t have without Remus’ mistakes. 

Occlumency was weakened by emotions. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I forgot to mention last week that we're more than half way through now! Hooray! We'll be back to every other week from now on, so I'll see you all in a fortnight.


	15. Chapter 15

****

**Bruges**

“‘Mione?” Ron whined from the bed as he stretched his limbs. 

Hermione jolted awake on the floor where she had fallen asleep with her head on Remus’ chest. The dawn light coming through under the blinds at the window was blinding to her tired eyes. 

“Ron,” Hermione replied, a little at the scratch in her voice as she coughed. “I’m here.” 

“Where are we?” he asked, leaning up on his elbows and the bedspread Remus had wrapped him in fell away from his torso and revealed the chiseled chest beneath it. For the second time in two days, she was struck by how much she probably  _ should _ be attracted to him. They were the same age, and Ron had a very plainly beautiful body, but when she looked at him, she saw an eleven-year-old boy with soot on his nose. 

It was nothing like when she looked at Remus. 

\-----

_ They’re talking to each other,  _ Moony growled too loudly for the early hour. 

Remus had been awake for a little bit before Ron had started asking for Hermione, and it was only Hermione’s words while she practiced Legilimency the evening before that stopped the growl that automatically rumbled through his mind. 

_ She doesn’t want him,  _ Remus tried to reason with the wolf.  _ She wants us.  _

_ Oh please,  _ Moony countered,  _ have you seen him?  _ You’d  _ fuck him given the chance.  _

Remus snorted a little and opened his eyes to see Hermione leaning against the radiator below the window. She was ethereally beautiful in the early morning glow, and she smiled at him briefly before turning her gaze back to Ron, who was talking on the bed. It was true that even without the glamour they’d found him under, Ron had become singularly handsome. His tall body had filled with muscle, and his jawline was strong and pronounced. But his beauty was nothing in the same room as Hermione, whose laughter rang out at something the redhead had said. 

“We need to get going,” Remus found himself saying, and urgency returned to Hermione’s gaze as her eyes snapped to his. 

“Where are we going?” Ron asked from the bed, clumsily failing at lifting himself up. 

“Caerphilly, in South Wales,” Remus answered, looking purposefully away from Hermione’s gaze. He couldn’t stand to watch the trust fade from them every time he revealed more of the information she didn’t know. “Charlie is the secret keeper for Harry’s location. Quickest way to get you both to Harry is to get you to Charlie first.” 

“Charlie’s okay?” Ron asked in a small voice, so much more like the teenager she’d known than the man before her. 

“As far as I know, Charlie is fine. I saw him last month,” Remus said carefully, wary of th emotional loads the youngest Weasley brother could handle. 

“Well, let’s get going, shall we?” Hermione said, standing up and walking over to Ron before she turned to Remus, expression a little lost. “How are we getting there?” 

“We’ll Floo.”

\-----

**Caerphilly**

Ron’s weight was overwhelming as she powered through the Floo and into a stone-walled room with several dark blue chairs and sofas. Hermione fell face forwards onto the floor at the feet of someone boating odd socks: one green striped sock and one purple polkadot. 

“RON!” George Weasley’s voice choked loudly as the weight of her school friend was pulled off her and she was able to gulp down a lungful of breath. “Hermione?!” 

Looking up from the floor, she could see George’s face frozen in hopeful horror at the both of them. She couldn’t stop the grin that split across her face at the sight of him. He wore deep maroon trousers and a fuschia t-shirt, his red hair long and pushed over to one side as he hauled his younger brother onto his lap on the floor. 

The fire roared green behind her, and she heard Remus’ footsteps come to a halt where she had fallen under Ron’s weight. 

“George,” Remus said from above her, “I’m so glad you’re here too.” 

Ron was on the verge of sleep again, his eyelids drooping as he whispered George’s name where he was slumped over his brother’s lap. 

George’s eyes filled with tears as Remus checked Hermione over and helped her get comfortable in a chair to her left. 

“What the fuck is going on, Remus?” George’s voice broke over the silence. 

Remus took a deep breath and pushed some curls away from Hermione’s face where she had begun to cry as well before starting from the beginning, to explain where Ron had been. 

\-----

They had been there for nearly two hours before they had even before they left Ron sleeping on the sofa in George’s living room.. George lingered behind, looking down at him and moving a piece of his long hair away from his brother’s face. 

Hermione and Remus left quietly, and they walked down the hall to a Muggle kitchen where a couple of people stood with cups of tea. Hermione thought that maybe one of them was a girl two years below her from Hogwarts, but she didn’t have time to confirm the thought as the young woman shuffled out of the room without making eye contact. In fact, everyone left. Within seconds, it was only Remus and Hermione in the galley kitchen staring at each other. 

They hadn’t been alone together since they had found Ron in Amsterdam. She had to remind herself; Remus was obviously still feeling the effects of the full moon from two nights ago. It suddenly felt like weeks since she had kissed him in front of the cage she had locked him in. It felt like a decade since he had pushed her deeply into the cushions of her sofa, since she had felt his naked body on top of hers. That his body was capable of what they had shared less than a week ago now felt like a fantasy. He sunk against the counter behind him, and although he was looking straight at her his gaze was clouded. He could do with sleep as much as Ron could. 

“You look like you’re ready for me to collapse any second,” he said, pulling her towards him by the hand. He tilted his head to one side and touched his nose to her collar bone. Maybe he was more capable than she first thought. 

Hermione let out a long heavy breath through her nose. She couldn’t be trusted with him alone; she would only injure him more should she be allowed unfettered access to him. 

Despite knowing that their time was limited here, that she had to find Charlie, the only other person who had traveled from Caerphilly to Elgin, she also knew that ever since she had entered Remus’ mind and seen herself through his eyes she was powerless to this. To him. The wolf wanted her so badly that he had broken past the man to get to her, and now although Remus was resting his bottom lip against her temple and his fingers traced circles on her neck as she melted into him, she knew the man would be more difficult to convince that he would not break her. 

“Remus,” she whispered, tipping her head back so that she could capture his lips while they were close. He kissed her firmly but made to move away too quickly. Her instinct took over before she could think, and her teeth closed quickly over his bottom lip. Quickly, she was the one with her back against the counter, and his lips were back on her, inhaling every whimper he caused within her. Her thighs tensed and relaxed methodically as his mouth trailed along her cheekbone without fully closing on the way to her ear where his hot breath caused a storm to travel from her scalp to her tailbone. He tensed as she shuddered. 

“I’m sorry, I’m—you’re…”

“Don’t you dare, Remus Lupin. You can’t say sorry or I’ll have to worry that you won’t do it again.” She pushed her hands under his jumper but over his shirt to the centre of his back. She wouldn’t let him escape. 

“Oh, by all means, do it again,” a sarcastic and bored voice said from the door of the kitchen. A voice that Hermione knew, a voice she hated. Her hands were fists in Remus’ shirt without her permission, and only because she was close to his chest did she hear the faint rumble of a growl. She looked up at his to find gold edging his irises before whipping her head to see Pansy Parkinson at the only entrance of the room. 

They were all very quiet for a few moments as Hermione studied the girl she’d hated since she was eleven. 

The first thing she noticed was the scars, large, obviously inflicted by magic and soft pink against the perfect alabaster of her face. Three jagged lines ran over both Pansy’s eyes with one long swoop extending from temple to temple. They were framed by her thick, glossy black bob, a little less perfect than it had been in school but every bit as beautiful. Her small frame stood in a proud position that was all show; Hermione could see the worry in the corner of the other girl’s mouth and the small shuffle of her feet. 

“Pans, there you are. Can you come back to the room? I want to talk to Hermione and Lupin before they…” They heard Charlie Weasley’s voice before they saw him. “Oh.” He came to stand stiffly behind Pansy. 

The four of them simply looked at each other. All Hermione could hear was the small, quick breaths gusting from her mouth. The rage in her battled with everything happening before her eyes. 

“Yes, Charlie. Oh,” Pansy said, obviously more comfortable with disdain than anything that would make the others feel less awkward. More quiet settled between them, during which Hermione noticed a wide, flat scar that sat above Pansy’s ankle but wasn’t fully hidden by the girl’s trousers. Pansy had obviously been gravely injured; the scars on her face weren’t yet all healed. She was obviously, now that Hermione had the time to focus and her hands and arms had relaxed at her sides, blind. “Well, Granger, don’t stop on our account. Do go back to snogging a werewolf in the kitchen. We’ve got all the time in the world.” 

“Pans,” Charlie sighed, “play nice. Last time either of them saw you, you—” Charlie froze, gaze widening.“What—Hermione, you were snogging a werewolf? LUPIN…”

“Thought you were the only one shagging a monster, Weas—?”

“You are NOT a  _ monster,  _ Pans. You have sc—”

“I’m sorry, did I miss a part where everyone had their eyes removed by a madwoman?” 

“ _ Excuse me, _ ” Hermione said, much louder than she intended. “Sorry, just—sorry, but this is a lot to take in.” Their conversation—argument maybe—had brought a lot of new information, and Hermione’s brain was working very quickly to prioritise and file away. 

“Charlie.” Remus stepped forward with his hand outstretched. “It’s so good to see you. It’s been ages. The Durham house?” Charlie and Remus stood with easy stances as they spoke, even with Pansy almost between them. Hermione couldn’t take her eyes off Pansy. She knew what Charlie was going to say; the last time she had seen the girl was when she had tried to convince her house to take Harry to Lord Voldemort just before the Battle of Hogwarts. Pansy remained in a defensive stance, her shoulders back, but her arm was behind her back, and Hermione could see the wrinkles in Charlie’s t-shirt where she was gripping on to him. The men were talking easily, catching up the way Hermione had caught up with Order members a million times. 

Charlie lifted his arm to rub the back of his neck, and Hermione saw the glisten of nail polish on Pansy’s perfectly manicured hand be revealed by the motion. 

“You have time to paint your nails?” Hermione whispered incredulously. She couldn’t remember the last time she had looked in a mirror let alone at her own cuticles, and Pansy fucking Parkinson was in an Order safe house painting her nails? 

“I have nothing but time, Granger,” Pansy replied, her face turning towards Hermione. The women had their own silent exchange, both changing from defensive stances to something more neutral at the same time while the men chatted. 

“So, Hermione.” Charlie turned to her, his expression nervous. He kept glancing back to Lupin as if something would happen and he would see them kissing any second. “Georgie’s Patronus said you had something to show me.” 

All four of them walked back to the small living room where George sat witht Ron’s head in his older brother’s lap so he could push his hands through Ron’s hair. A more motherly action than brotherly, but none of these men had seen their mother in so long that perhaps they would all have to look after one another as if she were here. 

Charlie dropped to his knees at the side of the sofa, taking Ron’s sleeping face in his hands and rested his head on his youngest brother’s sternum. Still, Ron didn’t wake up. Hermione knew what this was, she had read too many books that had seemed completely useless, but all mentioned this: Dreamless Sleep addiction. Sometimes people wouldn’t wake up for days at a time. For now, though she would have to leave him this way as her Pepper Up supplies were very, very low. 

The three who weren’t Weasleys were led by Pansy to a dining room where Pansy sat down facing Hermione and Remus. Remus, trying very clearly to keep an equilibrium around the situation, stood up and leaned against a large window at one end of the table, using the sill as a seat. 

“You can start now,” Pansy said, her shoulders and neck in such a way that should her eyes be open they would be looking at the table. 

“Start what?” Hermione said through her teeth. She would be civil if it killed her. She had more important things to get through than some strange drama with old school foes. They had to get to Elgin; she had to get to Harry. Pansy might have time to paint her nails, but Hermione felt more and more like there was absolutely  _ no _ time. 

“Questioning me,” Pansy replied, this time defensive in tone as she gathered herself. Her body language pulled up like a puppet being pulled only by the string at the top of its head. Pansy Parkinson was nothing if she wasn’t poised. “You weren’t told I was here.”

“I am not told a huge amount,” Hermione said, this time looking directly at Remus who had been suspiciously fine with finding the daughter of Death Eaters at the safe house run by Weasleys. He looked appropriately guilty, but she knew why he hadn’t told her. If the argument about Ron had taught her anything, it was that information had been purposefully kept from her. The less she knew, the less likely it would be that they would be discovered. Hermione was on her own and unprotected more than any other member of the Order. If she were captured, knowing where the missing daughter of one of their own was would be— deadly. “You were, that is to say, your eyes. Bellatrix?” 

“Bellatrix.” Pansy’s answer came in sync with her question. Hermione had known in the kitchen, before Pansy had alluded to her even, what the scars were; she had the same kind on her arm. 

“I have the same,” Hermione whispered. “I can’t imagine what that must feel like on your face.” 

“A fucking walk in the park, Granger. If anything, having eyes was a burden to me,” Pansy snapped and bristled away from Hermione’s empathy. 

“She took your eyes?!” Hermione said and took a deep breath through her nose. This was the reaction that Pansy had wanted. Hermione watched the tip of her bottom lip curve slightly on the left side, the girl’s poker face no longer as firm as it once was. 

“Technically, she burned them.” When Hermione took another breath, and Remus came to her side, Pansy’s face looked like she was playing to a captive audience. “When the Dark Lord found out that I had seen Potter but had not called for him, I was punished accordingly.”

“I’m sorry Pansy, that sounds—that sounds  _ awful. _ ” Hermione knew the pain that Pansy was describing, She could remember what it had felt like as Bellatrix’s knife carved into her arm, the pain in her teeth and in her toes. “How did you get here?” 

“Well, I hate to break it to you, Granger, but your friends are probably the least subtle people on the planet. You are all incredibly lucky that the Dark Lord’s followers are remarkably stupid or you’d all have been dead a long time ago.” Pansy sniffed, pulling the cuffs of her blouse so they sat evenly on her arms. Bellatrix could take her eyes, apparently, but it couldn’t take her standards. 

“You found them here?” Hermione asked, looking to Remus and seeing the flash of something comforting behind his eyes. Like a warm fire sitting behind his features, enabling her to feel calm as she learnt more and more of what had happened in her absence. 

“Well, I found Charlie. He had been talking with a Muggle baker in the town and then just walked back into the castle in broad daylight. There were Muggle tourists looking at him,” Pansy scoffed, and her brow bone lifted in a way that would have opened her eyes wide in disbelief. “I followed him and after a few minutes of wandering around looking for wards, Charlie had me at wand point. Luckily for me, I am truly superior at dueling.” 

Hermione snorted from her side of the table and Pansy’s face twitched towards her. How was it possible that someone was able to make intimidating eye contact without eyes? Pansy Parkinson was staring into her soul. Tension filled the room, and Hermione sat up very straight and pushed her shoulders back in an attempt to seem calm but not to be messed with but her hands shook. Amsterdam and Bruges had only been a day ago, but she was still prepared for for Death Eaters to arrive in the room. To find one just sitting in an Order safe house was wholly unnerving. 

Charlie opened the door, and Hermione jumped backwards to find that Remus was with her in a second, his arm snaking around her waist and his hand on her jaw as he peered into her eyes. His eyes rioted from green to gold and back again, and she wished again that he could just let himself feel protective of her without needing to protect her from himself. Charlie had the manners to look sheepish—but mostly just looked concerned—as he strode to pull his arms around the other girl’s shoulders. 

“Ron is awake,” he said, looking at Hermione over Pansy’s shoulder. “He’s asked for you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Those of you who know me, know I fucking love Pansy and writing her. I am SO EXCITED to have her on the team.


	16. Chapter 16

****

**Caerphilly**

“Ron-fucking-Weasley,” Pansy breathed behind Remus as all of them piled into the small living room that Hermione and the men had arrived in. 

“ _ Wait _ .” Hermione froze right in front of him and he knew she was figuring it out. 

Stepping around her, Remus gave her some room to breath but still held her hand as he sat on the arm of the sofa Ron was laid out on. Watching as the thoughts, theories, and conundrums rolled over her features, he was reminded of when she had first begun to research Harry’s condition. Every day had felt like her intelligence had reached its limit, but she had surpassed his expectations even then. 

This was no exception.

“You’re blind.” Hermione said, turning on the spot to look at Pansy. 

“You really are the brightest witch of your age Granger.” Pansy sighed, leaning against the wall as if she found it all so boring she might fall asleep any second. 

“You’re blind,” Hermione continued ignoring the other witch’s derision. “But you  _ found  _ Charlie, and you knew Ron was in the room? How?”

“Oh, she is clever.” Pansy sneered a little but without much heart behind it. “Turns out that Lestrange did me a favour with that knife of hers. She took my sight and left another sense in its place.”

“Another  _ sense _ ?” Hermione questioned, but from the look in her eyes she wasn’t really asking a question; they moved too fast, whirling around in their sockets.

“I know who people are by magical signatures, Granger.” Pansy spoke slowly, as if directing her statement to an especially dim child. “I have to have met them before but once I have, I could pick them out of a crowd like I could see them if I still had my sight.”

When Remus had first come back to the Caerphilly house to find Pansy Parkinson sat at the kitchen table with huge bandages round her head, Charlie had told him how she had found them. He hadn’t believed a word of it to begin with. But, slowly, as she recognised more and more of the people as they passed through the house - her ability couldn’t be denied. 

“How did you know who Charlie was?” Hermione asked, eyes lighting up with something new to learn and understand. 

“I didn’t know  _ which  _ Weasley it was,” Pansy said a little bitterly, no venom to her tone when calling Charlie by his last name. “Just that it was definitely a Weasley.”

\-----

Hermione watched as Pansy’s statement pulled Charlie from a soft and quiet exchange with his youngest brother. When his gaze landed on the witch, the look on his face was unmistakable; he was besotted with her. His deep blue eyes almost glowed with warmth when Pansy looked back at him, the cool haze in her own defrosting. 

“You have to come to Elgin,” Hermione exclaimed, turning to Remus, who was still holding on to her hand and gazing up at her. She blushed right to her roots but tried to really focus on what she thought felt like fate—if that wasn’t complete bollocks. 

“She’s not going anywhere without me.” Charlie stood, walking back to Pansy’s side and dropping his forehead to her temple. 

“Gryffindors are awful,” Pansy muttered but was unable to stop the smile that settled in the corners of her mouth. 

**Elgin**

Hermione found it much easier to Floo without the weight of a grown man on top of her. They had found enough Pepper Up in the Caerphilly house to get Ron on his feet, and he landed next to her on the carpet below them, his face lighting up at the sight of Luna. 

Quietly, he approached her, and Hermione was reminded of how large he’d become. His broad shoulders eclipsed the tiny blonde woman, and he wrapped her in a hug and swung her around in a circle. A light giggle echoed around them as Luna and Ron were reunited. Hermione wished, hoped even, that the bubbling fury at Luna, who had hidden Ron from her and decided her life for her for the past four years, could remain under the surface because she wouldn’t ruin this for Ron. 

Roaring behind her, the fireplace revealed Remus who either could read her better than she knew or her rage was more obvious than she thought. His face grimaced slightly and he weaved his arms around her waist so that he could turn her until she faced him. 

“Focus, Hermione,” he whispered against her temple. 

Charlie and Pansy arrived the next second. The older Weasley gripped her shoulders tightly as Luna moved away from Ron and placed a hand on Pansy’s jawline. 

“I’ve been looking forward to this,” Luna declared with a bright smile and dreamy look in her eyes before grinning even more brightly towards Charlie and Hermione. 

Avoiding confronting her feelings around Luna or even speaking to her old friend, Hermione turned to Remus and whispered the only word she could think clearly. “Harry.” 

“Draco can’t know that I’m here,” Pansy said very quickly, panic pulling her lips taut as she swivelled her body to lean against Charlie. 

“I think it’s best that Ginny and Draco only believe that Hermione and Remus are here for now,” Luna said in a voice that, for all it’s lightness and music, held no room for argument. “Hermione is about to ask a lot from them, and they shouldn’t be distracted.” 

“Ginny,” Ron growled from where he stood alone on the carpet. 

“You’ll be with your sister within the hour Ron.” Luna said, not looking at Ron but at the clock on the wall that read than it was twenty to three. 

She hadn’t kept track of the time in more than two days, and it felt irrelevant now. All she could think about was Harry. Seeing Harry.

Saving Harry. 

“You’ll find him two doors on the left.” Luna smiled brightly at Hermione, who had to resist the urge to scream. 

Pulling her by the hand, Remus navigated them out of the room they had arrived in and towards their destination. It felt insane that, after all this time, all the work that led to nothing, and all the practice she’d put in and the danger of leaving Lyon, all she would have to do is walk through a door to get to Harry. 

\-----

Draco could hear Lupin’s footsteps from down the hall. All the sound carried here, and no one huffed and puffed like the werewolf. He continued checking Harry’s vital signs, but when Hermione fucking Granger walked through the door, his magic cut out, and the colours that swam above Harry’s body disappeared. 

“HERMIONE!” Ginny screeched and launched out of the chair in which she was reading through a text on nutrition and magical cores. Granger looked like someone had slapped her round the face when Ginny pulled away from the crushing embrace she had held her friend in. 

Shaking herself physically, Granger smiled at Ginny before her gaze landed on Harry in the bed. Draco felt very suddenly like none of them should be there. This was a reunion of people who put each other before all others, best friends—family. A single tear glided over Granger’s cheekbone, and Lupin came beside her and placed his hand  _ interestingly low  _ on her back. 

Apparently there was no time to address that though because, with a deep breath, Granger turned to them and explained her plan. 

Her fucking stupid plan. 

After a while, Ginny glanced at Draco, who had been staring at her, waiting for her orders, and he tried to smooth his features while conveying that if Granger thought she could do it, then he saw no reason not to try. Maybe— _ definitely _ —they had been in this room too long, but Ginny understood him. 

“Okay, Remus can you go find Neville, please?” Ginny asked, though there was no question in her tone. She was in control of Operation Harry; Ginny was the law. Draco loved that. Loved that, at her command, Lupin left the room without question. No, “ _ Why should Malfoy stay?”  _ She was the law when it came to Harry; they just lived under her regime. 

With no time to think about anything else, Ginny put her hand in his with no regard for Granger. He knew in theory that she knew about their situation, that Ginny had confessed when she had visited the older witch in the spring, but he had never touched her or spoken to her without it being a potion instruction in front of another person. He had never had even the opportunity to ask her if she was okay or how she was feeling. All this bubbled inside of him; her tiny hand in his had broken a dam of frustration and was spilling into his guts, his brain, his  _ heart _ . 

“He looks so well, Malfoy. This is incredible work. What have you been giving him?” Granger wasn’t looking at him or Ginny, her gaze instead riveted on Harry. 

Draco realised that she hadn’t seen her best friend since the winter following the Battle of Hogwarts. At that time, Harry had been battling fevers, wasn’t on a long term plan to keep him healthy, to keep him alive. The Harry she saw now must have looked almost whole, with muscle mass and growth that was in line with a normal twenty-two-year-old man and kept in a perfect state of hydration and nutrition; he just looked asleep, which was why Granger was here. 

“I have everything over here,” he said, walking over to the dark wood cabinet that kept all the completed and tested potion vials. He had expected Ginny to let go of his hand as he walked, but she still clung to him. “This is for muscle mass; it's the one that took the longest to test because I had to lie very still for a few weeks to check in would work,” Draco started, pulling the yellow pearlescent vial from the top section of the cabinet. 

“You test these on yourself?” She interrupted, her eyes wide. 

Who did she think he would test them on, squirrels? She had obviously lost her touch locked up in the South of France, he thought. He wouldn’t say anything out loud though; he couldn’t. He was so close to the possibility of having Harry awake, and Granger seemed to be the only person who would be able to support him should the inevitable happen and he was once again exiled from Harry. Separated from Ginny. He wouldn’t risk it. 

“Yes, Granger. This one is for nutrition and hydration. I managed to combine them about eighteen months ago, which meant that Ginny... I mean, we could sleep through the night without having to wake up to give him a new potion every few hours,” Draco said, Ginny’s name foreign on his tongue. He hardly called her it, only when they had fallen prey to their instincts; only when he had felt her firm clasp around him, her mouth on him, had he whispered her name into the night. Coughing slightly, he continued, “This potion prevents bed sores. It also makes sure his circulation remains normal.”

“This is amazing,” Granger whispered, looking him in the eyes for the first time. 

“He is, isn’t he?” Ginny said with a wide grin. Draco rounded his eyes slightly, and Ginny didn’t miss his shock, but she just continued to smile at him, her face morphing into something slightly devious. Her expression gloated at him, clearly conveying that she’d told him so. That Granger would have no issue with their connection, with their love for one another. That Granger had been the right person to tell. 

“How are you going to fix Harry?” Draco said, his patience wearing thin. 

She had to have the answer. 

“Right, yes.” Granger shuffled her feet and looked for a place to sit. Settling on the small single bed, she crossed her legs beneath her and waited for Draco and Ginny to assemble on their bed with Harry lying quietly behind them. “Ginny gave me the idea, actually.” 

“I did?” Ginny asked, looking up at her, eyebrows knitting together. 

“Yes, you told me. Well…” Granger obviously felt uncomfortable about something, not that it interested Draco. He wanted to know how she planned to save Harry. He wanted her to get on with it. “You said something about reading someone’s mind? Well, that clicked somewhere in my brain because I somehow started to just… find answers.” 

Draco looked from Ginny to Granger as she spoke. Teasing understanding lit Ginny’s eyes, and he thought it must be something to do with Granger and the Marauder—nothing gave Ginny more glee than sexual gossip, and Ginny had been bursting with it when she had returned to him in March. 

“I believe that Harry is stuck somewhere inside his own brain. That he has somehow lost himself, and he needs to be pulled out,” Hermione hedged, chewing on her lip as her faze went hazy, following the trail of her thoughts. 

“You’re talking about Legilimency,” Draco replied stiffly. Voldemort himself had been inside Draco’s brain. He knew the pain; he knew what it would feel like to have another enter such a space. 

“Mostly, I’m talking about Occlumency, but yes, Legilimency will be needed to… overcome the situation.” Granger looked him in the eyes again. He’d forgotten what it felt like to feel the brunt of someone’s stare.

“Then I want you to try it on me first,” Draco said, unsure exactly what she was going to try, but he absolutely wanted to make sure she knew what she was doing. 

“I don’t know how that would work, Malf… Draco. I’m working from the theory that Harry has built strong walls inside his brain, so strong that I might have to force my way through. Would you know how to test me? Would you have the right conditions?” 

“I have one or two memories that I keep to myself, yes,” Draco said, reluctant to invite questions from Ginny. He would tell her after, make sure she understood why he needed to shield himself from certain aspects of himself. 

He watched as the realisation dawned on Granger that he was inviting her into his brain. That he would be the guinea pig, as he always was. To show that he meant everything he said, he took his wand out of his back pocket, loosened Ginny’s grip on his hand, walked across the room, and placed it on the table beside the door. 

When he turned, the witches sat opposite each other having some sort of wordless conversation. Ginny’s eyebrows moved so slightly that had he not known her face so well, he may never have noticed, and Granger’s mouth twitched in several different directions. Whatever questions they had been asking each other, they both seemed to come to a conclusion as they both nodded at each other and turned to face him. 

Draco didn’t know if that was good or bad. Had his cousin had such awful memories locked away that they had affected the young witch so completely or was she just awful at this? He supposed he would have to find out either way. 

He inclined his chin once, meeting Ginny’s eyes briefly. Trying to convey that he would tell her, he would explain everything that Granger saw and again, she seemed to understand him. Understanding flickered across her face, and he briefly wondered if she was somehow a Legilimens, but it was neither the time nor the place for that line of thought. He sat crossed legged opposite Granger, close enough that their knees were almost touching so that she wouldn’t need to lean too far to raise her wand to his temple. 

_ “Legilimens.”  _

_ There was no pain, so she must have been incredibly skilled. He could feel her presence, but it felt unobtrusive, as if she were always there. Like when he remembered anything, even a small detail, she had always been there. Impressed, he started to show her things that were not protected at all, beginning with when he discovered he could combine the nutrition and hydration potions.  _

_ He was hunched over the desk in the room two doors down from where Harry was kept, attempting to discover how to prolong the effects of the nutrition drought.  _

_ He added arrowroot to the cauldron, something that had been the breakthrough in making this potion work in the first place, but its murky surface remained unstable in the cauldron in front of him. When the door opened, he was expecting Ginny, who visited him here when he had taken too many hours or days to come back to their bed, but it was Lovegood. His open expression closed so quickly he might have strained a muscle in his forehead.  _

_ “Hello, Draco,” she said, talking in her best fairy voice. “Are you having any luck?”  _

_ She knew full well that he wasn’t;; she knew everything, wasn’t that the point of her? What use was she if she didn’t know where people were and where they needed to be. Why wouldn’t she tell him what he needed to add? Why didn’t she know this one thing that he needed?  _

_ “Lovegood., He replied, resisting the urge to scream at her. His usual cool tone that he had perfected over the years was harsh. He had been losing more control lately. Unable to hide his desperation, his grief. He had to hold it together, had to hide it from them. No one would let him be with Harry and Ginny if they knew. They wouldn’t understand.  _

_ “You’ve added the arrowroot then?” she asked, looking into the cauldron and then somewhere above Draco’s forehead.  _

_ “Yes,” he said, taking a long breath. “Yes, do you know what’s next?” he asked through gritted teeth.  _

_ “No, but you will in a few hours.”  _

_ The memory faded.  _

_ Draco couldn’t remember how long it took in the end, but it was mostly him staring at a wall until he realised he needed to add clary sage.  _

_ A new memory built in front of him, one that was not very fair of him. He was on his belly with his legs hanging off the end of their bed, his mouth is flush with the apex of Ginny’s thighs. _

_ From where Granger was viewing this, he knew that she could see him slowly pushing two fingers into the redhead’s cunt; see him suck her vulva into his mouth before swiping the flat of his tongue up and around her clitoris. But what she could see when Draco looked up from where he was concentrating: was Ginny holding Harry’s hand.  _

_ Harry lay motionless in bed. His body was still under the duvet, and his hand was limp in Ginny’s, but her gaze alternates between them as she squeezes Harry’s hand, involving them both. This was how she avoided the majority of the guilt; this was how she could look at herself in the mirror the next day.  _

_ One of Ginny’s legs was over Draco’s shoulder, and his hand was holding her waist, but he moved it quickly, clutching at her hand holding Harry’s. They were all holding hands. Even though Draco was eating her cunt for all he was worth and Ginny was whispering Draco’s name—they were focused on Harry. Like it was  _ for  _ Harry.  _

_ The memory faded. _

_ Next was a wall.  _

_ This was a memory that no one knew about. He kept this one hidden. If he were found and his memories were searched, this one would mean not only Draco’s death, but he would also be forfeiting the safety of maybe the only person he cared about that he didn’t sleep in the same bed as him.  _

_ He was facing the wall that was directly outside the Slytherin common room, which he remembered so well that he was sure Granger could smell the fresh water smell that permeated the dungeons in the summer. He knew, without a doubt, that Granger would be able to hear the  _ click-clack  _ of heels coming down the stone corridor. When a black glossy french cut bob swings around the corner, he could swear he heard Hermione gasp.  _

_ Pansy.  _

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you, thank you, THANK you to [Ravenslight](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ravenslight) for taking a chance on me when I blindly walked into Facebook in search of someone to help make this readable. You are the Beta of my dreams and it constantly feels like I'm working with a celebrity. 
> 
> Updates every other Tuesday.


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